Planetarion Forums

JammyJim · 27 Dec 2002, 18:48

RIGHTYHO...

my brother has just got a new pc for christmas and dad wants to use his old one which is still fairly fast (athlon 1100ghz)
however he wants to slap in 2 hard disks from an ageing AST.

the primary hdd has Win98 installed on it but we dont want to use this. We want to retain the WinME on the athlon and keep the current Hard drive in it working. (more space)

NOWWWWWW

as i understand it because the primary drive in the AST is currently set as the 'master' drive it will try and boot from that. However a quick change of the jumpers will set it to slave. NOW if i set it to slave does this mean that all the crap windows puts in its bootsector will be invalid and i can just go deltree c:\windows\*.*

?

ta muchly for advice.

JammyJim · 27 Dec 2002, 18:49

oh and the operating system will be upgraded from WinME before you begin comaplinign. i know its crap.

so does he.

heh

Mong · 28 Dec 2002, 02:15

I see no problem with putting in the second harddrive as the slave. Why not put it on the secondary ide as master too? Depends how much CD burning you do I guess...

M.

meglamaniac · 28 Dec 2002, 16:16

Where you place the CDRW is pretty much irrelevant these days, what with massive buffers and all. On top of that, any decent drive will have buffer underrun protection so should the buffer run out the write will be 'paused' until its full again.

I agree with mong about putting on secondary master - you should get better performance like that, especially when accessing both HDs at once. However, this is often impossible due to cable length restrictions and stuff.
For example, I have 4 IDE devices, and both my HDs are on the primary channel because there's no way in hell my cables will stretch up to the CDRW or DVD then back down to a harddrive.

Oh well.

Miserableman · 28 Dec 2002, 20:23

Quote:

Originally posted by meglamaniac

I agree with mong about putting on secondary master - you should get better performance like that, especially when accessing both HDs at once. However, this is often impossible due to cable length restrictions and stuff.
For example, I have 4 IDE devices, and both my HDs are on the primary channel because there's no way in hell my cables will stretch up to the CDRW or DVD then back down to a harddrive.

The speed on any given IDE channel is equivalent to the speed of the slowest device on it. Therefore, if you have two hard disks and two CD devices, you put the fast HDs on one channel and the slow CD devices on the other. It is wrong to assume that one high speed and one slow speed device on each channel is the best way to go.

To answer the original question, it shouldn't complain at all.

meglamaniac · 28 Dec 2002, 21:34

That is true of older IDE controllers.
Modern controllers allow independant modes for all devices.

Here is the very first match I got from google when I double checked just now, and it's not exactly super-modern (still talking about UDMA66).

Want further proof? Here's a screeny my secondary channel setup (device 0 is DVD, device 1 is CDRW). As you can see - two different speeds.

MT · 29 Dec 2002, 02:22

Quote:

Originally posted by meglamaniac

Want further proof? Here's a screeny my secondary channel setup (device 0 is DVD, device 1 is CDRW). As you can see - two different speeds.

Dont believe what the windows tells you, it has been known to lie thru its dirty teeth about IDE settings.

meglamaniac · 29 Dec 2002, 14:52

Tsk - bad windows.
In this case it isn't though - the same results are listed in the BIOS boot table (you know, the little table that flashes up on the monitor for about 0.5 seconds just after the memory check).

Luckeh!!!! · 30 Dec 2002, 01:09

Windows seems to be telling me the same sort of picture...

that the drive speeds are independent of each other.