Hard Disks

maxmangion · 13th October 2003

I have a 13 Gb Hard Disk set as Primary Master on my PC with Win 98SE installed in it. Now I am going to buy a new Hard Disk (either 80GB or 40GB) and I am planning to install it on my PC together with the 13 GB HD which i already have.

What recommendations would you make me as regards which HD shall i put as primary and which as slave and on which HD shall i put the OS ?

Thanks for your recommendations!

**PeteC** · 13th October 2003

My thoughts on this ..........

Your new drive (make it 80 Gb or larger - the price differential these days between a 40 and an 80 is insignificant) will be faster than the 13 Gb and should be the master. It would be wise to partition it with, say, a 3 - 5 Gb partition for the OS (say 8 Gb for XP) and split the balance two or three ways depending on the size of disk and use these partitions purely for data. Keep no data on the OS partition, then if you have to re-install the OS a reformat is less of a problem. Use your 13 Gb drive as a backup for your data and maybe a ghost of the OS partition.

maxmangion · 13th October 2003

thx for your recommendation.

Now since my OS and data are all on the 13GB HD, when i set the new HD as master and the current HD as slave, do i have to remove the OS (Win 98SE) first before i can install a new OS on the new HD.

Or is it possible that first i install an OS on the new drive, then i transfer the data from the 13Gb HD to the new drive and i remove the OS from my current HD later.

Thank you!

Profgab101 · 13th October 2003

Install new drive.
Fdisk - Partition new drive (reboot)
Format the Primary DOS partition (reboot)

Since the partition on the Master is still not tagged as active your system should still boot from the slave drive. Now use XXCOPY /clone to dup your install to the master HDD / Primary Partition.

Reboot back to DOS - Fdisk and now set the PRI-DOS partition to active. (if fdisk complains that an active partition exists - pwr off and remove the slave drive then try again.) Once the partition is active you will need to power off (reconnect old HDD if needed).

Next time you boot it should be from the new drive. - you can then format the old one from withing windows and use it for extra space.