Hard Drive Question

[Guest]

My primary drive is a 20 gig and I have a secondary drive which is 60 gig. Is there any way I can swap them over and make the 60 gig the primary drive? If anyone could help, it would be greatly appreciated.

[Guest tgabriel]

Can be done. First, make sure the 60 is jumpered for master and is cabled as the first drive on controller0. Jumper the 20 as slave and cable it as the second drive on controller0 or jumper it as a master and cable it as the first drive on controller1. Then install your o/s on the 60 and you are good to go. Your bios should be autoconfig for drive characteristics so there should be no bios issues. To look and make sure just hit del or F1 or whatever your system wants to access the bios on start up and look to make sure the drives are auto configured.I assume the 60 is already partitioned and formatted but if not, you need to do that and the o/s install will take care of that for you. You will want to partition this big ol' drive to make file management easier and you will want to format in ntfs, NOT fat32. You will probably have to call M$ and get a new registration for the o/s if you are using XP but M$ says they will help customers who are upgrading to larger drives if they can prove they are not pirating the product. This is why I am staying with win2kpro for the next dozen or so years. Make sure your bios is set to boot from the CD first and not the C: drive so that the o/s install runtimes will get invoked at boot up. Otherwise you will have the bootstrap looking for the o/s where it isn't any more. After you finish and confirm that you are booting to the 60 and all is well, go into your computer manager and wipe the 20 or do whatever you plan for it.An observation before I go though. Your situation is really ideal to leave the 20 for the o/s and other system related software like the web browser, your e-mail client, your av and firewall, your iis if you are into serving web pages, and your... well, you get my drift, and make a small (<5GB) partition on the 60 for the page file and the rest of the 60 for your fun stuff like the sim and all the add-on files and video and music files we all accumulate. To do that first you need to make sure that they both spin at 7.2k rpm. Second, put or leave the 20 jumpered as the master and cabled as the main drive on controller0. Then jumper the 60 as a master and cable it as the main drive on controller1. Your multimedia drive should be cabled as the slave to the 60 on controller1. The result of this is that you have two master drives that get priority for calls from their programs and from the o/s and by putting your page file on the second master (in that small partition mentioned above) you get far quicker access to the page file if it becomes necessary. Not likely but possible, especially in times when you have a whole bunch of applications running at the same time. Also, by having the two drives on separate controllers they do not compete with each other for access to the cable in file reads and writes. This kind of bottle neck can slow things down a lot.Whatever you decide to do, make sure you back up all critical data.