Creating a slave drive? Help!

[sprites43]

I've never installed a storage/slave drive before. But I was wondering if what I listed seems right.

1. Install the new hard drive as the master, and change the old hard drive jumpers to slave.
2. Check the fdisk to set partitions on new HD.
3. Install the OS.
4. Drag important documents from old HD to new HD.
5. Format the old HD.
6. Drag the documents back to the old HD and use it only for storage.

Does this all sound ok? If there are any holes missing, please tell me
And is it possible to create a partition just to boot windows? (My friend said this loads and runs windows fastest) Any truth to that? And how big would the partitiona have to be?

Thanks!

 

[compudog]

Here's how I do it. I take the old drive out completely, install the new drive (jumpered as master or single drive) then install the OS on this drive. It's during the initial FDISK process that you would partition the drive (creating a physical and logical drive(s).) If you are installing a larger drive as your boot drive, it may be helpful to partition the drive with a partition for windows and another for other stuff. Anyway, once I have the new drive working, OS loaded etc, then I power down, jumper the NEW drive as master (if it isn't already) and then physically connect the old drive (now jumpered as slave,) copy off what I need then finally, I FDISK and format the old drive (or at the very least "deltree" the old windows.)

I'm sure there are better ways to go about this, but this method has worked for me for years.

 

[sprites43]

The new drive I will be installing is an 80gb, and I'm going to slave my current 40gb hard drive. Could you recommend a partition size to boot windows?

 

[compudog]

It's up to you. Why not partition the drive as 4-20 gig parts? This should make defragging the OS partition much faster. Or, put the OS on a 10 gig part, and slice up the rest however you want. The OS part is by far the one that will get the heaviest action and the most fragmentation.

 

[Rav3n]

I have a 120 GB drive, I put windows on a 20 GB partition, but its not necessary. 5 GB will even do the trick, as long as you decide you want to NOT use the default C:\program files\WHATEVER as the install directory for all your software. If you are going to leave every program to install there, then you want your windows partition to be a bit bigger, if not, a bit smaller... Anywhere from 10-20 is a safe bet.

 

[sprites43]

I think I'm going to create a 10gb partition for windows and use the other 70gb for installing and running programs. Then I'm going to use my slave drive to store documents, and everything I download. This pretty much covers everything! Thanks for all the help! This is gonna be a sweet setup

 

[speedlever]

I'm in the process of setting up a new drive and partitioning is of interest to me as well. My old 30 Gig drive had 6 partitions. I'm considering one large partition in my new 60 Gig drive after reading this FAQ.

Since this was written about 17 months ago, is it still good info? The only area that gives me concern is defrag... but setting defrag as a scheduled task during the middle of the night should take care of that.