adding another hard drive

bh70116

New Member
hi,
i decided i want to add another hard drive to my system. i currently have a 10 gb and i want to add a 100 gb. my question is which one should i make master and which one slave? also how does that work with two drives will i have to reinstall windows on the new drive? when i download something will i have to chose which drive to put it on or will it just be like having one bigger drive?
any help would be appreciated thanks in advance.
 
The one with the OS on it should be the master drive. And if you want to keep the OS on the 10GB, then all you need to do is set the jumper on the 100GB to slave, install it, and you're good to go.

You wont need to install anything on the new drive unless you plan to use it as your OS drive.
 
That will depend on the version of Windows you are running at present and intend to run. The 10gb will be cramped once you start installing a number of new programs. If you are currently running XP you will some 2gb of drive space just for the swap file Windows creates temporarily for virtual memory. With a new drive 80gb of larger you could easily split the drive into two partitions with the second as a storage partition. In the disk management section of Administrative Tools after custom installing Windows to the primary reduced in size you would simply create and format the secondary there. This would provide plenty of room for both software installations and a second for storage and backups of data.
 
i am using windows xp home. if i do as omega said will i have to chose where things are downloaded or will it automatically go to the bigger drive?
thanks
 
No, it won't automatically select the larger drive. You can, however, change the default download directory (and also move the My Documents folder, Outlook stores, etc... to the larger drive).

As PC eye said, you might find the 10GB drive to be a little cramped to install programs on. There's also another issue. Given that it must be an older drive, the performance likely won't be as good as the newer drive, which may translate to slower access times.

A program like Ghost will allow you to easily copy the entire contents of the old drive to the new one, should you wish to use the new drive as the boot drive and still avoid a reinstallation.

If you are currently running XP you will some 2gb of drive space just for the swap file Windows creates temporarily for virtual memory.
If you do decide to use the 10GB drive as the boot drive, i'd definitely move the swap file onto the new drive (Here's how: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886/).
I doubt you'd need a 2GB swap file anyway.
 
The only problem ghosting is that sometimes Windows won't run properly even though all files, folders, and settings are preserved. The 10gb drive is probably running at 5,200rpm or even less while the newer and larger drives run at 7,200rpm. Western Digital's 75gb Raptor Serial ATA drive tops over that even with the 10,000rpm seen there. With at least 25% of the drive already taken up by XP's installation and reserving some 2gb for swap files you are better off performing a clean install to new and larger drive after deciding whether or not to split into more then one partition. Here I now run two 250gb drives(bought second when hearing strange clicking sound caused by old board failing) where the second has 135gb primary used for backing up the host drive. The remaining space will probably be used by a version of Linux.

When downloading files to a specific folder and then closing that out to browse and then going to download something later the last folder opened to save the prior download will appear. Everytime you download you will see the last folder a file was downloaded to. I usually recommend creating a folder outside of MyDocuments, Windows, and Program Files for saving downloads of various types to. In that folder several sub folders for things like updates, utilities, drivers, even media files are kept out of the way of most viruses, malwares, spywares, adwares, etc. since they mainly attack default locations for Windows and softwares. In the even of needing to reinstall Windows those files are still intact. A single drive with a second partition for storage and backups is often seen. If the primary has to reformatted due to some infection the secondary generally remains uneffected. In fact XP will create a new primary and still see the secondary after a fresh install. If you have never had a drive larger then your current one you are in for a big surprise when you see how much more space you will have there.
 
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