Making my secondary HDD into my primary HDD

Question

I have a 10 GB hard drive connected directly to the motherboard, and a 40 GB connected via a IDE controller card. I want to remove the 10 GB (my boot drive), and make the 40 GB (secondary) into the primary and only hard drive in this computer.   My motherboard's IDE connection is ATA-33 and the controller card is ATA-100, so I want to keep the 40 GB on the controller card. How would I make it the primary drive while keeping it connected to its controller card?   Please provide in detail on how to go about this. I'm not an expert on stuff like this. Thanks.

rickmktg · Answer

@Greyraven wrote:

I can't just copy everything from C: to D: without having to reinstall OS and such?

No, you can't do that. The reason is that your C drive does not contain the driver to boot to the card that you bought. Windows needs to be configured to boot to the card, you hit F6 during Windows XP install (assuming that's what you have - for older OS check the card manufacturer's instructions) to load the driver.

If D is empty, you can try but it most likely will not work.

rickmktg · Answer

@Greyraven wrote:

I have a 10 GB hard drive connected directly to the motherboard, and a 40 GB connected via a IDE controller card. I want to remove the 10 GB (my boot drive), and make the 40 GB (secondary) into the primary and only hard drive in this computer.

My motherboard's IDE connection is ATA-33 and the controller card is ATA-100, so I want to keep the 40 GB on the controller card. How would I make it the primary drive while keeping it connected to its controller card?

Please provide in detail on how to go about this. I'm not an expert on stuff like this. Thanks.

Unhook the 10gb drive, boot into bios and make the ROM Device the first bootable device, then reboot and install your OS on it, then your programs, ...

Majestic · Answer

Visit the manufacturer's web site for your 40 gig drive and download their installation software.  The software will offer the option to clone your 10 gig drive to the 40.

rickmktg · Answer

@Majestic wrote:

Visit the manufacturer's web site for your 40 gig drive and download their installation software. The software will offer the option to clone your 10 gig drive to the 40.

I don't think this will work, see my reply.

Greyraven · Answer

I can't just copy everything from C: to D: without having to reinstall OS and such?

Majestic · Answer

@rickmktg wrote: I don't think this will work, see my reply. The way I see it the ATA controller card shouldn't need a driver to boot since it's BIOS is loaded when the machine is booted and will manage the drive attached to it.  It would be no different than using the controller card when booting to MS-DOS which the ATA-100 card supports.  If the poster would use the cloning software downloaded from the manufacturer then more than likely it will have it's own bootable OS included to clone the drive in a DOS type environment.  The alternative would be to just move all the hard drives to the motherboard controller for the cloning process.

Storage, Drives & Media

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