Adding a hard drive

looie_looie wrote:
- I'm about to add a Maxtor Ultra ATA 100 (5T040H4)
- 40 gig HD to my 3 year old Dimension XPS R400 which
- has a standard 8.4 gig HD. Someone who knows what
- he's doing is going to help but he assigned me to
- get answers to these questions before we roll. Any
- help is certainly appreciated. Here are the
- questions:
-
- GENERAL
- Q: Providing we maxed out the current IDE devices on
- the existing cable (there's the factory diskette
- drive, a factory DVD drive and a CD-RW drive that I
- added), is
- there another connection from the Mother board for
- the new Drive, as well as
- any other future IDE devices?
- Q: Any particular version of FDISK we should be
- aware of?
- Q: Is a Bios update required or recommended for what
- we're doing ?
-

You will have two IDE channels. You can have two IDE devices per channel.
Your Hard drives 'should' (IMHO) be on the 0 channel, with the boot drive as master and the second drive as slave.

Unless you are installing a drive over 60GB, any version of FDISK will work.

You don't list the BIOS version you have, But I recommend (IMHO) that you update your BIOS to the latest version.
You might even consider using the Intel version of the BIOS. (special procedures are needed and Dell will no longer support your system)


- ADDING THE DRIVE AS SLAVE, BUT NOT INSTALLING WIN 98
- YET
- Q: Do we need to prepare the Bios or anything else
- for that matter regarding
- the ATA/100 support? Is this taken care of in the
- Auto Detect
- process.
-

If you just are adding the drive as a slave you need do nothing in the BIOS. The BIOS will auto detect the drive at startup.
Your system does not have support for ATA 100. The drive will be backwards compatable and will operate at the speed of your system.


- ADDING THE DRIVE AS SLAVE, THEN SWITCHING IT TO
- MASTER WITHOUT WIN 98
- INSTALLED
- Q: What concerns we should have when converting the
- Master to Slave
- and Slave to Master, aside from making sure our
- Jumper settings are correct?
- Q: Do we need to prepare the Bios when making the
- switch?
-

I do not know what your intentions are, so I will 'guess'.
I 'guess' that you will want to use the newer drive as your 'boot drive' and have Windows installed on it.

I would suggest that you install the new drive as master on 0 (primary) channel. Set the jumpers on each drive for this.
Start the system with a floppy boot disk and FDISK and format the new drive.
Install Windows on the new drive. (see my web site for full instructions)

Once you have Windows installed onto the new drive I suggest that you copy your files and such from the old drive to the new drive and format all partitions on the old drive.
You need to install all your software from scratch anyway since you are doing a fresh install of Windows and this way you will have a nice clean 2nd drive to use for storage or what ever.


- ADDING THE DRIVE AS SLAVE INSTALLING WIN 98, THEN
- SWITCH TO MASTER
- Q: If we decide to install Win 98 on the new Maxtor
- drive while it's a
- Slave, is it ok then to switch it to a Master drive
- after the installation?
- Q: In the case of multiple systems, how do you tell
- the computer which one
- to boot from.
- Q: Do we need to prepare the Bios when making the
- switch?

See above for my suggestions.

But 'No', you should not install Windows onto the drive while it is the slave and try to move it to master. It will not work, as it will be installed as a drive other than C and the registry will be on the present C drive.

You can buy software that will allow you to dual boot.



Mis Dos Centavos,
Darrell


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