On  5 Mar 98 at 9:43, Loy Pressley wrote:

> I'm about to add a 5.2 GB Western Digital HD to my system.

  Great choice; I'm very happy with mine.

> I currently have a 424 MB Western Digital HD as primary and a 1.2
> GB Seagate HD as slave.  This configuration has worked well for a
> considerable length of time.


> The documentation for my motherboard says that it will support a maximum
> of 4 hard drives

  Standard on-board EIDE, two channels of (up to) two drives each.

> and I have the physical room to install the new drive
> in the tower case.  I would prefer that the new 5.2 GB HD become the
> master drive containing C: logical drive so that the system would boot
> from it.

  Then you must install it as the master on the primary channel --
eventually.  See below.

> Will I run in to problems because there will be an odd number
> of drives on the system?

  No.

> What's the most efficient way to configure the drives?

  The 424MB is certainly the slowest drive in the bunch; plan on
moving it to master on the secondary channel.

> System particulars:  Gateway 2000 4DX2-66V with pentium upgrade 83 MHz
> chip,

  Haven't seen many of these; the P83 upgrade always struck me as
overpriced and underpowered.  How has your experience been -- would
you do it again?

> upgraded Phoenix Bios that support LBA, Win 95a operating system,
> 1.2 GB floppy,

  YES!  5.25" boot floppies rule.

> 1.4 GB floppy, CDROM drive, tape backup system, SB16
> sound card, 56.6 internal modem, 40 MB ram, Western Digital 424 MB HD,
> Seagate 1.2 GB HD, flatbed scanner, laser printer, no network installed.


Procedure

1.  Get yourself a copy of Partition Magic.  In this instance, Drive
Copy is insufficient; PM does all that and some more besides.

2.  Install your new drive as master on the secondary channel.

3.  Use PM to copy the Primary DOS partition from C: to the new
drive.

3a. Use PM to expand the copied partition to whatever size you've
decided to use.  FAT16 maxes out at 2GB.

4.  Use PM to mark this partition "active", so it is bootable.

5.  Shut down, and swap drives so 5.2 is primary master and 424 is
secondary master.

6.  You should now be able to boot from the 5.2GB drive.

7.  Once you're certain everything works, you can wipe the previous
boot drive data from the 424MB and use it as E:.  You can also create
partitions in the remaining space on the 5.2GB drive.


David G