Quote:
Originally posted by 911ctS
Thanks soooooo much you guys! This is great help.
Can I just take my old HD out and replace it with the new and then boot from the XP CD? Then can I use my old 10 gb HD as a third HD and wipe it clean without it corrupting my new one?
Thanks,
Clint
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Yes, and likely yes.
Most compuers come with two IDE controllers. On each IDE controller, you will have two devices, primary and slave.
If you have two hard drives and a cdrom drive, assuming of course this is all ide (but chances are pretty good that it is), then you should have room for four ide devices (per controller).
Here's the thing about IDE. Only one device can talk on the bus at a time. So keep that in mind. Your new drive will probbably be the biggest in your system (since the price of storage goes down so quickly), so I'm guessing that you will do most of your installing and/or burning to/from the new drive. If this is the case, I would put your new drive on a different bus than your cd/burner/dvd/whatever.
Now turns to the question: how does your computer know which drive to boot off of? The answer is in your BIOS. Usually, to get into your bios you'll need to enter something like F1,F10 or
during the power on self test (POST). If you set your new drive as anything but primary (controller) master (device) you will need to tell your BIOS where to boot from. Also, if everything is connected properly and you can't boot from CD, check the boot order in your BIOS to make sure the CDROM is the first device in the boot order (or it might try to boot from an old install).
With this in mind, I would make your settings as follows (though you'll probbably want to think about it more than me: -) :
Primary Master: New Drive
Prmary Salve: 10 Gig Drive (unless you've moved all your new stuff your second hard drive, then dont connect it at all - it's using a lot of power for so little space and hard drives are life limited anyways.. and most PCs dont have very big power supplies.. overload it and all of your components can go out in one sweet zap)
Secondary Master: 2nd hard drive
Secondary Slave: cdrom/dvd/whatever
IDE Devices are ususally master/slave selectable using jumpers.
I should also mention that thinner stranded cable vs thicker stuff. I think the thicker stuff is rated for only a 66mhz bus, and for 100/133 you likely have a thinner cable. If a device on a bus is only rated at the lower 33 or 66mhz, i think it forces the entire ide bus speed down to it's max. So that's something to think about when puting everything together.
Good luck