HD Removable Rack questions?

[WinOS2Mac]

I was thinking of getting one of those removable racks for HD's in my computer.

I have a Big enough tower to support it so thats no problem.

I had a few questions though, If anyone has one of these they might be able to answer. First let me give you my specs as of right now.

-Full Tower
-Asus A7V motherboard.
-2 HDD (1 UDMA/100 40GB, 1 UDMA/66 15GB)*Western Digital

-Yamaha 16X CD-R Drive
-2 network cards (1 Kingston, 1 Linksys)
-BEFSR41 linksys router
-Pacbell DSL pppoe
-Windows 98 SE
-Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Optical
-Microsoft Natural Keyboard


* the 2 hard drives are each partitioned.
the 40GB hard drive is partitioned 5X (this one has the C:\drive, its the master)
the 15GB is partitioned 2X

I wanted to know how i can add a hard drive in the rack and make it my bootable HD so when i get another hard drive I can install Win 2000 on it with some different settings or something and have it as a backup in my closet.

I guess what I want is to keep my hard drive now as it as but move it to the rack and have another hard drive that has a clean copy of windows (98, ME, or 2000) doesn't matter which, so that when someone is going to use my computer for something I can just swithc the hard drives and let them work on a different one.

but will all of the hardware settings and configurations stay intact?

You know as I'm typing this I'm kind of answering my own questions, I'm sort of getting an understanding but I would still like your input to be sure


thanks a lot!

[mousepotato]

...the racks I have are only ATA66 and I now use a main drive with ATA100 inside but before that I had 2 drives (3 total, 2 that had the OS & one for MP3's & other files) in removable racks with one as master & one as slave...I could use either master drive as such just by popping either one in...if you are willing to settle for ATA66 just make one "bay" your master and remove the personal one and install the generic one when you want to let other people use it....just set both as the master...it's also a clean way of using other OS's...

You'll have to buy 2 racks to do it right...lol


[This message has been edited by mousepotato (edited 04-25-2001).]

[c3p0-11n]

don't both ATA66 & ATA100 use the same ribbon?

Win0S2Mic I would think that as long as you have the ribbon to the rack socketed to ide0 and install the OS's to their individual HD the hareware would match. With the bios set to auto I plug different drives on to test them with scandisk with no problem

Would dual boot do the same thing or can't trust the people who use your PC.

[WinOS2Mac]

Well I tried to Dual boot with Win200 but It didn't work and my hard drive is now running out of space so It's better to have a new one I think.

Plus my father now wants one to store his music. He has a lot of music and now he wants to convert his entire collection to mp3. I dont want to use anyother removable media like Zipo disks or tape drives or CD's so I rather use this.

How do i know if the rack supports 7200 RPM?

I know that it says ata/66/100 and it has a built in fan, but i don't know if it'll support 7200 rpm.

Well i found some on ebay that looked good and they're only like around 20$

If i have a hard drive that is partitioned into a rack as the master bootable drive and then remove it and place one that is not partitioned will that chagne my drive letters of the CD ROM and CD-R drive?

wait that belongs to the OS right. so It will but it's like a different system, I think

Ok well thanks for the responses

[c3p0-11n]

watch out for Ebay ! try here http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ACE115

I bought 4 from geeks and they work good. I dont think the RPM of the HD will affect to Rack or vice versa.

If you remove a HD from the ribbon or add one to the ribbon (removable rack) it moves the drive letter in or out 1. yes

But if I understood you right you wanted to move your C: to the removable rack. I am not an expert on this but I think if you do you will have to replace it with a usable C: drive. I think that unless you change the boot sequience in bios it will only look at the same place each time.