Sp4rt4n

I currently have a 40 GB hd, over half way full... And im most likely getting an 80-100 gb hd for Christmas... I was hoping to keep my 40 GB HD (or all the info on it) and make the new one my primary one... Im missing the little connecter out of the back of the HD that makes it a slave/master/whatever... Is there any place i can get a new one? Right now its stuck on single...

Next:

Ive heard about something that speeds up data transfer between HDs or from the seconary HD or something... can someone explain that to me?

Next:

Id like to make my new HD a primary, and have a fresh install of windows on that, but not on the 40 GB one... can i remove ONLY WINDOWS from the 40 GB hd, or would i have to completely reformat?

  

Necrosis

1. Hmm never heard of a place where you can get these jumpers from. Know any one with any old drives?

3. All you have to do is leave the 40gig un-attached when you do the windows install on the new drive. After you install windows attach the old drive, and then mount it in windows under Control Panel/Admin Tools.

Sp4rt4n

hmm.. alrighty, anyone know where i can buy one?

Cannyone

I sent you a private message about some jumpers.

Necrosis is correct, in that the easiest way to get this to work is install Windows without this drive connected. Then connect it afterwards. The only minor inconvienence this will cause is that your ROM drive will take up the D: letter. Now you can change this but it would be best to do so immediately after the install completes so only Windows looks to "D:" for files it wants from the install CD/DVD.

Personally I would also recommend setting both drives to "Cable Select" and placing the New Drive at the end and the Old Drive in the middle connector. This will make the Master Drive the Newer Drive and the Older Drive the slave. Also don't connect a HDD with a CD/DVD-ROM drive on the same IDE channel. The reason is because this slows the HDD down considerably. Master/Slave drive pairs operate at the data rate of the slower drive.

chezy

1) For the speeding up thing, youre probably talking about a 80-conductor cable, you will be able to use UDMA 5 (100MB/sec) wwith this cable in use.
2) Why delete the old windows installation, it would be good to have a dual boot system incase something happens to the new one, would just have to edit boot.ini to use it, to remove only windows is easy but as you'l have enough space, copy all the essential data to the new hd and format the old one, then copy things back.
3) I think i read somewhere that the limitations of connecting a hd and a cd-rom to the same ide dont exist in newer motherboards, dont know for sure though.