Help! 3rd Hard Drive Setup

[squigly]

Hi. Looking for some guidance.
I'm getting a third hard drive and am
not sure on one issue. I know, 3 drives
is a lot but one can never have enough
storage. Price is very good. Hope it's
not hot. Getting it from a guy in my
office who works in IT. Oh well, on to
my situation.

I have 2 drives on the primary ide channel,
one master, the other slave. I have a cdrom
set as master on the secondary ide channel.
When I install the new drive, do I install as
slave on the secondary ide channel or do I
reverse them so that the cdrom is the slave.

Thanks

 

[Spiff]

you can do it either way... but keep in mind that the master usually has slightly better performance. so, depending on what you intend to do with the drive...

 

[DAM]

i would go with your two original drives the way they are then your cd rom as master and your new cd rom as slave, just my personal preference.

ive always liked having the cd rom as a master

dam()

 

[DAM]

good lord only my second double post ever

im a loser

dam()

 

[Henry Kuo]

I would say put it as secondary slave too. Consider that as a 3rd hdd, I would use it as a rare data storage. In that case usually the CDROM is accessed more often than that 3rd hdd, so, putting the CDROM as secondary master is more appropriate.

 

[squigly]

Thanks everyone for the help.

 

[squigly]

Ok, i installed the 3rd hard drive. In the bios I set the
secondary slave to auto and it detected it, no problem.

Booted to windows and it shows in device manager but not
in explorer. Windows never detected new hardware. I
figured it means I need to format it for windows to see it.

Went into DOS and started FDISK.
Chose drive 3 and got to this point when I decided to ask
for help to make sure I don't screw it up. FDISK asked me
to choose of the of following:
1) Primary dos partition
2) Extended dos partition
3) Logical partition

Which do I choose?

Thanks

 

[Underclocked]

1: and if the drive is going to be a single partition, that's the only one you need worry with.

 

[pyr]

If you dont want it to mess up any disk settings you already have partition the whole thing as an extended drive, then setup logical partitions inside that. if you set it up with a primary partition then it will mess up your drive settings unless your main drive is set up all as one large drive and you dont have any other drives. if you do what I just said then it will just add numbers on to the drives you already have

 

[squigly]

Hi. I've created a primary dos partition with fdisk for my
new 3rd HD but I can't get it to format. I keep on getting this message: "Invalid media type reading drive e"

After partitioning, I booted from a start up disk and when I
got to A, I typed: format e:
I also went to the e drive and tried the same thing and got
the same response.

When I try to access drive e via explorer, I
get the message "E:\is not accessible. A
device attached to the system is not functioning."

What does this mean? What should I do? Can I format
by opposite clicking on e in explorer and clicking format?

Thanks

 

[squigly]

Thanks for all the help. I figured out the formatting problem.
I needed ot clock back my cpu to spec and all went well.

Now it's on to updating the bios. Wish me luck!

Thanks again