2nd hard drive question

Hi, not sure where to put this question, so I hope this is the right place.

I am still somewhat new to seting up hard drives, so I am not an expert.

Here's my question.

I have 2 80 gig hard drives and my motherboard has 2 connectors for two hard drives to be plugged in separately. So would it be better to use each hard drive in each connector or set them up as master and slave drives?

I don't really know how to set them up as master/slave, so I thought maybe using the two separate connectors on my motherboard would be easier.

Is there any advantage to using the 2 separate connectors over the master/slave setup? Or is the master/slave setup the best/fastest way to go?

What I want to do is have Windows XP on one drive and on the second have Windows ME, but still be able to send data from one drive to the next. I also would probably want to use one drive to store Ghost images of the main drive on (probably Ghost images of XP only).

My motherboard is an MSI K7n2. Athlon xp 2100. 512mb ram. With ide1 and ide2 connectors for 2 separate hard drives to connect to the motherboard.

Thanks very much for any assistance.

 

You have two IDE channels. Each channel can support two devices. It's best to put the hard drives on one channel, and optical drives on the other channel. Set the jumper on the back of each hard drive to Cable Select mode. The hard drive connected to the far end of the IDE cable will be the master drive, and the other will be the slave drive.

A better strategy is to partition the master hard drive so you will have two primary C partitions (one for WME and the other for WXP) and one extended logical partition D. Use FAT32 for all partitions. Put the data you want to share in the extended logical partition D. Use the boot loader to switch between WME and WXP.

 

If I was doing the dual HDD install I would have one as master and one as slave on the same cable. If you are not experienced you might not want to start partitioning you hard drives yet.

bigc

 

Thanks for the answers. I have always heard NTFS is more secure than Fat32. I would rather have NTFS, so I'll probably go with that for XP.

I could always just do the master/slave setup and have XP on my main HD and ME on the slave drive, and just not have the ability to exchange data between the two drives, right?



Bigc, would Partition Magic allow me to start partitioning my hard drives fairly easily? All I would like is to have a partition on my slave drive for Ghost Images. Would it be easy to do this with Partition Magic?

Know any other good (maybe free) programs that are as easy to use as Partition Magic?

Thanks.

 

NTFS isn't really that much more secure than FAT32, so far from what I've read, NTFS provides a basic encryption system, which, is to protect files form people accessing from physically being on the system, it doesn't help much on the Internet or on a Network (That I know of.) - There is one alternative if you must/wish to use NTFS on the XP partition, you could get Sysinternals/Winternals NTFS driver (It says its for 98, but ME is just 98 rebranded with some extra features.) - http://www.sysinternals.com/ look under utilitys, the read version is free (You can read files off the partition from WinME, but not write anything to it from WinME. - If you buy the full version you can have full read/write support.)

 

Partition Magic is straight forward to use especially if you already have data on the drives which you don't want to loose. If you are going for clean installs then the disc manager in XP itself will do the job without having to purchase any third party software. I did use PM when I had data which I did not want to loose etc but when I fitted a new HD plus my second one it was a completely fresh install and XP took charge of the partitions without any problems.

 

FAT32 is faster and is compatible with WME. You said you wanted to share data between the two OSes. You can download the full version of Bootit ng and try it for 30 days, FREE. Bootit can partition HDs, image HDs, and multi-boot OSes for only $35.

 

Thanks very much for all the help everyone.

But if I put XP in FAT32 would I still be able to use programs like Prevx and Process Guard that only work on XP?

 

Of course. FAT32 is a file system used by the OS, WXP. A program doesn't care if you're running NTFS or FAT32. W9.x, however, will not be able to read a partition formatted with NTFS.

 

In my opinion partition magic is the easiest way to partition, it is what i use and you will be able to exchange info between a master and slave drive. I did it with xp and 98se for a while on my last computer. ntfs can read fat32

hope this helped

bigc