Setting up slave drive?

[xxpentium]

okay here is my prob, i want to set up a slave drive but when i boot into windows i can not find any trace of it. this is on a abit be6 and the drives are set up on the raid cables. i have a western digital with os (master) and seagate as slave. on startup it shows this to be true. what exactly does a slave drive do. does it expand the size of the master or is it a seperate drive? what i want to have is another icon in my computer as my slave drive so i can save directly to it. also, if i set up the slave will i be able to copy my os from master to slave? please help

[Nighthawk]

If everything is jumpered correctly (be wary, WD drives usually have a single option and a master option), WD master Seagate slave, you can do this the easy way or the hard way.

Hard way:

boot using a system boot disk, then type "fdisk". Change partition to primary slave (there's an option to change current fixed disk). Create a new partition using all of the space (if FAT32 or NTFS, FAT 16 = 2GB partitions max). Reboot (using boot disk).

Now you should have C: and D: drives. Type "format D: (or whatever drive letter fdisk assigned)" and it will start formatting. Let it go, and reboot (not using boot disk).

Go into windows and you should have a new drive letter to save to.

Be careful using fdisk and format. If you specify the wrong disk or drive letter, you could lose all data on the disk.

Easy way:
Download and use Seagate Disk Tools from <A HREF="http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz_utilities.html" TARGET=_blank>http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz_utilities.html</A> . It will do everything contained in my "hard way" description from within Windows.

<start edit>

Raid cables? I hope you mean IDE cables (total of 2 or 3 connectors, 40 or 80 conductor wire)

A slave drive is just a way to denote that you have two hard drives on a chain and you are using the slave or the master.

If you want to have both drives be the same drive letter, you are going to have to use a RAID controller and use some variant of raid 0.

[This message has been edited by Nighthawk (edited 02-25-2001).]

[Rat]

you need to first make sure the jumpers are set correctly; the western digital should be set to master and the seagate should be set to slave if they are on the same ribbon cable. if the segate is on a cable by itself, it needs to be set to single. next you need to format the drive. use your windows boot floppy and at the A: prompt, type in: format D: and hit enter. take the floppy out and reboot. the drive should now be in your my computer.

[This message has been edited by Rat (edited 02-25-2001).]

[xxpentium]

they are both set up on same ribbon and wd is set to master and seagate to slave. but my wd hdd is split into 2 seperate drives in my computer c(2gig) and d(8gig). is there any way to get rid of this without reinstalling os? or can i just somehow set slave up as f drive? when i boot it says primary master as the wd hdd and primary slave as seagate so i know that is set up properly, they are just on the abit raid instead of the ide.

[Nighthawk]

You are not going to be able to merge your C and D drives without either getting something like Partition Magic or doing a complete reformat.

Your slave drive will default to the E drive.

As I said, there's an easy way and a hard way to do this.

[xxpentium]

thanks everyone who helped, i got it going. used diskwizard and everything worked. now i have 18gig of space(lol)