How to make new hard drive master but keep everything on old harddrive?

[ninjamyst]

Hey everyone,

I recently bought a new WD 160gig 2mb hard drive. My old hard drive is only 40gig 2mb. Here are my questions:

1. Is it better to make my new hard drive as the master drive because it is bigger?

2. If I do want the new hd as master, how do I install it while keeping everything from my old hard drive?

I download alot of movies, music, and such so I want one hard drive to store all my multimedia stuff and the other hard drive to run the OS. I also want to create a partition on the slave hard drive for my pagefile. I would appreciate any advice on how to do the installation and also on the best possible setup. Thanks guys!

[Sixpac_XP]

I would just keep your 40 gig as the primary drive and make your other drive the secondary... you won't see any speed increase unless the old drive is 5400 rpm and the new drive in 7200 rpm. If they are both 7200 rpm then just add the new one.

As far as the pagefile.. I've put it on the primary, secondary and on its own drive and I haven't found that its made a difference at all.. so in my opinion just put it where ever you think you want it to be.

[ninjamyst]

They are both 7200 RPM and 2MB cache. But yea, I think I will just keep my old one as master.

As for the pagefile, I have read in many places that it is better to allocate a different partition on a separate harddrive to increase. However, I have one gig of ram so I doubt it will matter....

[Bill in SD, CA]

Keeping the old one as master means no OS install and all your apps won't have to be re-installed.

Bill

[ninjamyst]

Ok. So I installed the new hard drive as slave but it takes FOREVER to transfer files. It takes 30 min to transfer about 5 GB. Is that normal? Also, the computer randomly restarts itself in the middle of file transfers and I have to start everything all over again because some data got corrupted. Any advice?

[EpyonMelee]

i have somewhat of the same problem too......my new 60gb drive slows down the the ENTIRE computer. the orginal drive was a 40gb maxtor ( the 60 is a maxtor ) and it takes too long to boot up. i thought of raid but id lose 20gb any help would be helpful. but right now i just unplugged it. oh yea the 40 is in the master and the 60 was slave

[Bizkitkid2001]

What OS are you running? Also how do you have the drive formatted? Using NTFS or FAT32? If your running windows XP, make sure you have SP1 installed to activate large drive support over 147gb. If you are running windows 98, I think you have to download a patch for it to recognize drives over 147gb.

[ninjamyst]

I am running windows XP with SP1. The drive was formatted with the disc that came with the Western Digital hard drive, NTFS format. Plus I am sure it can support over 147gb because it confirmed that in the beginning of the installation. Both hard drives are on the same IDE channel.

[Bizkitkid2001]

THe only thing I can think of for the data loss is windows not ebing able to recognize drives over 147gb. I had the same problem when I installed my 200gb WD. But it was fixed after installing Sp1. I'm sure someone else here will have an answer to your problem.