WD2000 SATA format

Hello!

I have an older hard-drive at home (WD2000 SATA), so I'm thinking of puting it in my PC so that I'll have two HDD's and so that I can have another pagefile.sys on my second HDD and use it for more virtual RAM. Do you think that's a good idea since I can't afford to buy new "real" RAM? And what kind of problems can I face in doing this, will I have to reinstall Windows XP (hope not)? There's also a possibility of a nasty virus being on that old HDD, maybe even in it's boot sector, I'm not sure, so how do I prevent it's spreading to my healthy HDD that I already have installed. I have to do a low-level format, including boot sector and I'm afraid of that virus, so please help me pull through this.

Thank you!

 

You don't need a low-level format. Just delete the partition table. Connect the disk without autorun/autoplay enabled, delete the partition table and format. That's it.

Moving the pagefile to a second disk should speed things up, especially if you tend to use sizable portions of it. Should make a difference, but it won't be a revolution or allow you to use so much more system resources.

You can do this without a reinstall - only a single reboot.

Mrk

 

Thank you for your help! Before I start asking more questions, please tell me how much will I gain with adding another HDD and moving the pagefile.sys from C:\ to the new HDD (in terms of virtual memory, not in terms of new HDD free space). Thank you!

 

You'll gain in terms of speed - two hard disks working simultaneously.
Mrk

 

As gain I mean what will I gain in terms of lower latency when recording music (for example)?