Larry wrote:

> My current machine specs are a Gateway E-4200 purchased in
> September 1999, a TABOR motherboard flashed with the latest BIOS
> update dated 11/30/99, Pentium II 400, 196MB RAM, Windows Me, A:
> 3.5" Floppy, C: 13.6 GB Quantum, D: Toshiba DVD, E: Sony CD-RW, F:
> Zip 100MB. The C: and F: drives are on the primary channel with C:
> as master and F: as slave and the D: and E: are on the secondary
> channel with D: as master and E: as slave.
>
> I never use the DVD drive and plan to pull it out and replace it
> with a new EIDE 60GB HD from Western Digital. I would like to clone
> the old C: drive onto the new hard drive and use the new drive as
> my boot drive since it is a 7200RPM drive. I would then use the old
> hard drive as a backup and data storage drive. ... As I understand
> it, I just set the new drive as the master and the old as the
> slave. Pull the DVD drive, install the new drive, copy over the
> files and when I reboot everything will be copacetic. Am I missing
> anything here or is it as easy as it seems? Thanks for your help.

  There's a slight flaw in your plan.  When you swap the existing C:
drive to slave and install the new unformatted drive as master, you
(a) must re-detect the drives in the BIOS configuration, unless their
all set to auto-detect, and (b) you now have a primary master drive
that isn't bootable, so you're going to have to boot from somewhere
else (floppy?  May need to change boot order in CMOS as well...) in
order to copy the existing C: partition.  Once the partition is on
the new master drive, you'll also need to mark it "active".  (These
are all jobs I use Partition Magic for, although other tools are also
available.)

  Someone else has posted that when you have two devices on a
channel, they all run at the speed of the slower device.  I believe
this was true of the original IDE interface spec, but somewhere along
the line from IDE to ATAPI/EIDI/UDMA, controllers got smart enough to
run master and slave at different speeds.  Meanwhile, CD-ROM drive
makers started making the drives capable of fast interface speeds,
even though CDs themselves are slow, to avoid slowing down hard
drives sharing a channel with them.
  The bottom line is that with a DVD-ROM drive and a 1999 motherboard
(and its controller), this should not ever be an issue.

David Gillett

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml