Question about hdd's on the primary master of the motherboard IDE

[Jonty]

OK, some of you may know that I was trying to transfer my Windows 98fe from my old Bigfoot drive (connected to the motherboard IDE1 as primary master) to my new Maxtor on my Promise controller card (connected to the card IDE1 as cable select).

I successfully did this today and Windows and all my applications work fine.

Now what I wanted to do was put the old Bigfoot back onto the motherboard IDE channel and use it to put the swop file etc. I hooked it up, went into fdisk and deleted the partion (it was still showing as active), then recreated a partition. The problem is that it has given this new partion drive letter C and made the Maxtor C active partition into D. Obviously I couldn't have that so I deleted the partition and the Maxtor went back to C.

I have left the drive connected but with no partition. My Zip drive is the primary secondary on this channel and I left the Bigfoot there as when the Bigfoot was disconnected for some reason the Zip wasn't recognised despite the fact it was connected.

If the worst comes to the worst I'll put these two on the controller card.

Is there some way to make the system look at the controller card first to start assigning drive letters, and then to look at the motherboard IDE's?

[DoctorReno]

I think ideally you want the Bigfoot on the Primary IDE channel and jumper it as the Slave, connect it to the middle, Slave, connector on the IDE cable.

Your plan to put the swapfile there is good so long as the Bigfoot is as fast or faster drive than your new Maxtor.

When you partition the second drive be sure you do NOT set it as active.
Also, many people like to create a dedicated partition on the second drive for the swapfile. This will minimize it getting fragmented and also force the swapfile to be on the outer most tracks of the drive to improve seek time.

You should have your Zip drive on the secondary IDE channel along with the CD drive.

[Jonty]

Originally posted by DoctorReno
I think ideally you want the Bigfoot on the Primary IDE channel and jumper it as the Slave, connect it to the middle, Slave, connector on the IDE cable.

Surely this would still make the drive letter C?

Here is my setup:

Motherboard
IDE1 Primary master is Bigfoot (no partitions, no drive letter)
Primary slave is Zip letter M
IDE2 Secondary master is DVD letter N
Secondary slave is CD-rw letter O
I reserved the letters for the Zip, DVD and CD-RW.

Promise controller card
IDE1 Master is Maxtor boot drive letter C (with partitions D E & F)
Slave - nothing connected
IDE2 Master is Quantum Fireball drive letter G
Slave is another Maxtor drive letter H

It seems that if there is a drive connected to the motherboard it will be drive no 1 with the letter C assigned to it, regardless of other drives elsewhere.

I wonder what would happen if I had the Zip as the primary master and the Bigfoot as primary slave?? Can't do that just yet as I am using the computer to type this!

[DoctorReno]

Actually it can make a big difference how you have your devices configured.
I believe you should reconfigure your system and get the two HD's on the Primary IDE channel and I think your drive letter assignment will be corrected. Usually, not always, but quite clearly in this case, Windows and many MoBos want the drive that will have the OS on it to be attached to the Primary IDE channel as Master. I'm fairly certain that if your move your maxtor to this configuration that it will be the C: drive and maintain the C: designation. This assuumption of mine is further backed by the fact that when you partition your Bigfoot and it is on the Primary IDE Master your system wants to make it the C: drive.

Also, I am pretty sure that your Zip drive is a PIO transfer rate mode device so even with a newer board with chipsets that allow for independent DMA transfer rates on a channel, a PIO device attached to that channel will force both devices on that channel to run in PIO mode.

What this means to you is the way you have it configured, your Bigfoot is running in PIO mode rather than the level of DMA that it is capable of. Absolutely, in this configuration you do NOT want your swapfile on it.... your swapfile and overall performance will take a definate hit.

I think the solution is clear that you need to reconfigure how your devices are setup on this machine.

[Jonty]

The thing is my machine is getting on in years (but works great and does what I want it to do). The motherboard only supports ATA33 drives, of which the Bigfoot is one. I got the Promise controller to run faster disks, like the Maxtor ATA133, and it runs great on this. That is why it is on the controller card and not the motherboard. I can certainly tell the difference in speed of opening applications with the new Maxtor as boot drive.

I think you are right in saying that the motherboard (an Elite P6BX-A+) requires that the boot drive be attached to it and not a card.

I will try and put the Zip as primary master and the Bigfoot as primary slave to see what happens but it looks like I will have to attach it to the controller card.

BTW, I have my swop file and Temporary Internet Files on one of the other disks to improve performance, but I did so want to use this old Bigfoot drive for this as it has done sterling work these past few years!

[DoctorReno]

I understand your reasoning and desire to improve performance. In total honesty with your setup you will want your swapfile on your maxtor because it will simply be faster there. The idea of putting it on a 2nd drive is sound but only if that 2nd drive is as fast or faster than the drive the OS is on and the Bigfoot is significantly slower. I would manually set the size of the swapfile tho to minimize resizing and that should make it a little faster. You wiould probably benefit a bit by also setting your VCache settings to match your memory.

[Jonty]

I've been doing a bit of digging around and it does seem that my only way of using this Bigfoot drive is puting it on the controller card. I just want to use it not have it lying useless in a drawer!

Yes, my swop etc is on the other Maxtor which is the same speed as the boot drive. I set the swop size as minimum 50mb with no maximum, it's worked great like this for a long time

[nodnerb2]

Hi,

If you want to change your drive letters in Win 9x have a look at thid free proggie

http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/

I used it on an older machine a couple of years ago and it works just fine and dandy.

Cheers

Nodnerb2

[Jonty]

Hi nodnerb2, interesting utility, I've downloaded it but haven't used it yet. I think mainly this program is for CDROM letter changes, that is why I have reserved my CDROM letters further into the alphabet so they don't get changed when a new hdd appears.

Thanks for the link

[nodnerb2]

Hi,

I works on all the Drives.

I used it with an old Compag Deskpro that had a whopping( in physical size) 4 Gb HDD in it partitioned into two 2 Gb bits.

I added a 13 HDD which was only recognised as an 8.4 Gb Drive owing to the limitations of the BIOS some searching found another neat utility called EZE Bios which allows larger drives to be used where the BIOS is limited to 8.4 Gb.

I wanted to have my Drives with the largest one as C and so on down to the smallest one. That Drive Letter Assigner worked perfectly for me and still works in a fashion today as I use whats left of the old Compaq when I am fooling around with odds and sods. It's quite handy to be able to just drag stuff off the 13 GB drive onto a HDD that has had a fresh install insted of ginning about with CD's and Floppies.

I was actually going to throw it out until I discovered this use for it.

Cheers

Nodnerb2