Have 2 old hard drives. Want to make one master, one slave

[[Myth] Theseus]

I currently have 2 hard drives

* 100 gig (old one)
* 40 gig (new one)

the 40 gig one has xp professional on it, and the 100 gig has xp home. I want to make one a master HD and the other a Slave.

It would probably make more sence to make the 40 gig the master and the 100 the slave, right?

What i want to do is this:

Format the 40 gig HD so all there is left on it is XP pro. Then have the 100 gig HD with everything still on it as a slave. Is that possible? If so, how?

I cannot format my 100 gig drive, but i can format my 40. Would I have to do it the other way around and make my 40 gig the slave?

Please help me.

[Bill in SD, CA]

Welcome to TechIMO!!

You can set the 40 to master and the 100 as slave.

Boot off your XP CD and format the 40 and install XP.

Bill

[[Myth] Theseus]

Well....I made a mistake. I totally forgot that my computer was still up and running, and i inserted my 40 gig HD to the slave. Well...the 100gig froze and now I cannot boot off it at all. A blank screen comes up.

I CAN boot off the 40 and put the 100 in the slave position and still see all my files that are on the 100. And they are still accessible. I just cannot boot off the 100.

Is there a way that I can make the 100 the slave still? The os dosent seem to want to load.

[jmichna]

You've got a couple options.

Assuming your drives are ATA-66 or faster, and you are using an ATA-66 (80 wire) cable... the one with a blue connector at one end...

The master drive must occupy the connector at the terminal end away from the blue (motherboard) connector end, and the slave must occupy the connector in the middle. Most of the time, you can set the jumpers on both drives to "CS" (cable select) and the terminal drive will be your master. Optionally, using jumpers, you can set the terminal-connected drive to "master," and the other drive (attached to the middle connector) as "slave."

Once you've done this, at next boot, go into BIOS and confirm which drive is master (usually denoted IDE-0) and which is slave (usually IDE-1)... sometimes these will be IDE-1 and IDE-2, respectively.

You can now proceed with partitoning and formatting as you decide.

PS: Hope you didn't toast your original drive by "hot plugging" in the second hard drive!