Hard drives;

[glpops]

I put a new hard drive in a dell xpsr 350
Its a Maxtor 20 gig 7200 Ultra DMA 100. I want to use the old hard drive which is a 5 gig 5400 ultra DMA 33 also a Maxtor for a back up. My question is kind of two parts, first will the old drive as primary slave effect the performance of the new drive? My other question is the Maxtor 5 gig that came in the Dell is partitioned, I'm going to format it and then want to make it one 5 gig drive.
I'm just not sure how to do this in fdisk.
Appreciate any help thanks;

[This message has been edited by glpops (edited 06-23-2001).]

[OC Guy]

I think this might help you. Alright, on my computer, the biggest harddrive i made master, the smallest i made slave, and i copy all my important files to the slave. If master fails, then i change a jumper on the slave, makes it a master, then I'm back in business. The slave has windoz 98se, hidden, non-active, and i think logical. If you need any further instruction, post it! And can you tell a difference between the 5400rpm and the 7200rpm drives?

[S.D.Willie]

dont worry about the drives hindering each others performance. you might want to install your o/s on the fastest drive though
(the 7200)if you like.......

as far as partitioning goes you can just boot with a win98 start up disk (head over to www.bootdisk.com to get one or just make one yourself.)run "fdisk" from the a: prompt.
hit yes to enable large drive support.
bascially you have to delete the logical drives first, then the extended partition, then the primary dos partition.(if its fat)
after that just create one partition, set it to "active" then quit out of fdisk.
you have to reboot, then use the start up disk again, load with cdrom support, then type "format C:" (without the quotes)then you can switch to your cdrom letter and run "setup".

if you are going wipe out your operating system, why not just install 98 on the 20 gig, set up the other hard drives as a slave and a master on the other cable and format the other 2 in windows. just a thought.
good luck.

SD

[S.D.Willie]

http://pcsupport.about.com/compute/p...to/htfdisk.htm

this was from a quick search........

SD

[glpops]

Once again your help got the job done. I have tne 5gig as backup,took out the D-E partitons and created a new single partition for the drive. Thanks again, your help is really appreciated. Pop's

[S.D.Willie]

SD