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Master vs Slave

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7 replies

by galehickey2

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Currently have WINME as a OS. I want to install
a second hard drive with 50% as an extended drive AND the other half I want to install WIN2000.
Do I set the second drive to master and the current drive to slave and how do I FDISK THE SECOND DRIVE. Thanks-

7 replies

by ann777

The drive that contains the "active partition" is the "master" drive. It is the drive your WinMe boots from when it is power on. Generally when you purchase a second drive for the same computer, you need to set it to "slave." Adding a second drive and installing Win2000 on it is not a problem. To install it, you connect it, make sure the bios sees it, and then partition (fdisk) and format it.

http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/idedrv1.html

The above site has complete explanations andfive sections on how you can setup a second hdd. It also describes what you should do if you want to setup the new drive as primary and the first drive as secondary (or slave).

You may also want to read about dual booting:

http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/dualboot1.html

by anomalus

It should be enough to set the second drive as slave. When you install W2K it will update boot.ini on your boot drive(the one with WinME) so that you can choose witch OS you want to boot.
If you do it the other way around and set the old drive as slave and the new one as master you would have to update the boot.ini file on the win2k disk to point to the WinMe partition in order to be able to boot WinME.

Now to FDISK. Well evedently you create two partitions. It really isn't important witch one comes first. When you install W2K it will update the boot files automaticly. I recomend booting with the W2K CD though and partitioning within the setup. It's much simpler then FDISK.
One thing to have in mind is that WinME can't read NTFS partitions so the extended one should use FAT32. But use NTFS for the W2K partition since it's a far superior file system.

by amr_ahmed40

Gale,

Technically speaking, the master drive is referred to as the first drive on the IDE Cable, on either IDE port. The first slot is the one in the middle of the cable and not the one on the end.

Secondly, you must setthe JUMPERS on both HDD's to be either "CS (Cable Select)" or the jumper on the drive connected to the first slot as "MA (Master)" and the second HDD as SL (Slave).

You can not use a combination of both. The system will attempt to boot from the Master disk first. If you have multiple operating systems, install the oldest one first.

You can then install the latest operating system on ANY partition you like, if you have hte hardware setup correctly as described earlier.

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