adding 2nd HDD -- questions

[glc]

Here is how I would do this. Put the new drive in as master and the old drive in as slave. Download "Data Lifeguard Tools" from Western Digital and run it - it will make a boot disk. Boot with this disk and do the automatic setup. When asked, tell it to copy drive 1 to drive 0. This will clone the old drive to the new one. Then you can pull the old drive, or leave it in and reformat it for extra storage.

Even though the new drive is an IBM, the WD software will still work because you have at least 1 WD drive in the system.

[jharris]

I have an 8gig WD HDD in my system now and I'm going to add a second, larger HDD. I want my 2nd HDD to be an IBM DeskStar @ 7200 RPM (IDE). What is the best way to go?

Should I copy everything over from my current HDD to my new one and make it bootable? If I do this, do I take my 1st HDD out to FDISK the 2nd one? Once the 2nd HDD is partitioned do I simply copy the contents of the 1st to the 2nd and set the 2nd as the primary drive?

Lots of questions (probably too many). Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Charliey]

Well, you can either copy everything over, and it will work, or you can reinstall everything. If your setup is working fine, then you should just copy it. But, if youre existing windows installation is buggy, and old, you might want to reinstall everything to get a clean start.

To copy everything, you leave the existion hard drive as primary master, and then put the new one in as something else either primary slave, or secondary master. Then you copy everything over, and shutdown. Set the new drive as primary master and the old one as something else and restart.

------------------
-Charlie

[DLLfix]

And remember, if you put a new faster HDD on the same data cable as an old slower one, you will end up running at the old slower drive's speed.

[england001]

dllfix - have to disagree about your comment on hdd speed - if you have an ata66 and an ata33 hdd with an ata66 cable on an ata66 mobo - ata66 will run at 66 and ata33 will run at 33 - the 33 will not `slown down` the 66.