Can I run my new SATA hard-drive as a secondary or slave drive with my old IDE drive as the master?

Question

My motherboard has both types of interface, and I run my PC and windows XP from the IDE drive. I am going through the process of moving things to the new hard drive, but can I run the SATA one as a slave drive and then load XP onto it? Or must I disconnect the IDE drive and load XP onto it separately?

Answer 1

Master and Slave only exist in the IDE world, SATA does not use that system. So you would leave the IDE as master, and the SATA would be just there, it cannot be set as a master or a slave. If you are planning to do a direct copy from one hard drive to another, make sure you have a program to do that, Norton Ghost is good, because just doing a straight copy all from one to the other will not get the job done.

Answer 2

I have a 30Gb Ide which I use as my Master and a 160Gb SATA which I keep all my personal stuff on, along with all my downloads. This works very well 'cos 30Gb is enough for loads of programs including Macromedia Studio, Nero 7, Office Pro 2003, which are all big. In fact I'm contemplating another new SATA' cos this one's getting full. The biggest benefit is if Windows crashes, I lose nothing.

Answer 3

I would set the SATA drive master & IDE as master too :)



There's nothing to stop you doing that as they are both on different 'channels'.



When you get round to loading XP then I would load XP on to the faster drive (the SATA one) - XP will give you the choice of which drive to load itself on to so SATA or IDE is no issue.



HTH

Answer 4

on an IDE drive the jumper set the mast / slave. so you should be able to



I did it the other way round using the IDE as a slave

Answer 5

i use both..



you can set the option in the bios to which boots first.. OR use a boot menu, which there are loads of

Answer 6

Check your motherboard's manual to see what SETUP settings you need to do this.