Dual Boot question,pertaining to master/slave hookup...

Sometime in the next few days, I am going to fix my brother up witha dual boot system..He has windows 98 on his old harddrive, but wanted to try Windows XP, so he purchased an additonal harddrive to do this on. Newt has already covered(I think pretty well), what I need to do to set up the dual boot system. My question was where to install the new harddrive. He currantly has his present hard drive as master on IDE1, along with a CD rom as slave on IDE1. He has a DVDburner as secondary master on IDE2, along with a CDburner as secondary slave on IDE2. I am going to remove his CDrom, and install his CDburner as the primary slave on IDE1. Now,,where should I place the new harddrive, either at secondary master or secondary slave on IDE2. Bear in mind that he wishes to copy CD's on the fly, thus the reason for moving the CD burner to IDE1. Any ideas?
thanks,
coadman

 

Hi coadman,

From what I have read on the subject, it should not make much difference for the HDD to be as slave or master on IDE 2.

I have found that some older optical drives may be fussy about their position, not the newer ones.

If you were really interested, you could try benchmaking in both positions. Although be careful, some benchmarking tests (writing) can wipe your drive (OK to try if you have a freshly formatted drive). You can find benchmarking in AIDA32 and SiSoft Sandra.

If I had the time and a few HDD's to spare, I'd like to try it myself .

Matt