Second hard drive as a slave

[TAZZ]

I'm currently running win98 with a pentium2 3 gigs of space which is running out and I want to add a second hard drive( Maxtor 80 gigs) as a slave...My question is is that too much for my system and if not could I install it and also put XP on it but still use it as a slave drive

[Wrnchhead76]

Welcome to PCMech!!
What are your system specs? Tell us what you know about your computer and that will help us help you.

[Nuclear Krusader]

I don't think it's too much.

But I also think that it's best to leave the larger drive as master. Partition it and install the OS onto it. Then leave the smaller one as a backup or to remove it from the system.

Dunno about your system but I suspect your current HD is ATA33. Am I wrong?

[glc]

The odds of the bios on a Pentium 2 system being able to see bigger than a 32 gig hard drive are not too good. You will probably need a controller card if you want to add a large drive. Yes, you can install XP on it as a dual boot with an existing Win98 installation. However, a Pentium 2 is a bit slow for XP to work well, how much ram do you have?

[TAZZ]

I have 160 mb of ram and yeah I was thinking the same thing about the bios system so should I stay at around 30 gigs....another thing is I also have a cd burnner and dvd with a floppy dive with dsl and no open bays so could I replace my floppy drive with a new hard drive just b sure to make a new boot disk

THANX 4 ur time

[glc]

See if you can determine where your bios tops out at - it's probably gonna be either 8 or 32 gigs. If it's 32, you could replace the 3 gig with a 30 gig and use software to clone the old drive to the new and just remove the old drive completely. If you have an open PCI slot, you can get a controller card and put as big a drive as you want in it. You could partition the new drive and install XP on a different partition and have a dual boot machine. However, a P2 with 160 ram is pretty marginal for XP, it gets pretty doggy with less than 256 ram and 400 MHz.