2 HDDs: 1 SATA & 1 ATA

Looking for confirmation I'm doing the right things. Otherwise, suggestions...

The ATA master on my second computer died suddenly. Of course, it had to be that and
not the nearly empty slave. I'm kicking myself for putting off switching to a much
newer SATA drive that's been gathering dust because now I'll have do much more work.
My plan is to use the SATA as my main HDD (C: and E and the old WD ATA slave that's
still OK for the paging file and non-essential data (D: and F. Just want to make
sure setting up the second drive (old slave) as "master with no slave" on the ATA
port is the best way to go. It will be on that ATA port by itself.

Thanks!

Larc

"Larc" wrote in message
...

My plan is to use the SATA as my main HDD (C: and E and the old WD ATA
slave that's
still OK for the paging file and non-essential data (D: and F. Just
want to make
sure setting up the second drive (old slave) as "master with no slave" on
the ATA
port is the best way to go. It will be on that ATA port by itself.

Jumper settings are probably printed on (or embossed into) the case of the
drive. For master or solo, default setting on 10-pin ATA drives is no
jumper

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

Larc wrote:

My plan is to use the SATA as my main HDD (C: and E and the old WD ATA slave that's
still OK for the paging file and non-essential data (D: and F.

There are a lot of different opinions about where to put the pagefile if
you have two drives. Some say the fastest, some say let Win manage it,
some say on the first part of the less used.

After reading several different answers, I like this one the best
http://tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks5.htm The Page File - The
following recommendations are based on research, information gathered
around the web, and personal experience dealing in a variety of
configurations.

Alternatively, you may want to read a lot of different answers for
yourself by doing your own searching on something like - which drive to
put the paging file on

Just want to make sure setting up the second drive (old slave) as
"master with no slave" on the ATA port is the best way to go. It
will be on that ATA port by itself.

If your previous configuration was jumpered for master and slave and not
cable controlled, then you would change your jumper to master. (unless
see below)

I'm also reading in the wikipedia that WD has a jumper position for
having a single hdd instead of sharing the cable, but I don't recall
having seen that configuration personally.

"If there is a single device on a cable, it should be configured as
master. However, some hard drives have a special setting called single
for this configuration (Western Digital, in particular)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance...ogy_Attachment



--
Mike Easter

Mike Easter wrote:
Larc wrote:

Just want to make sure setting up the second drive (old slave) as
"master with no slave" on the ATA port is the best way to go. It
will be on that ATA port by itself.

some hard drives have a special setting called single
for this configuration (Western Digital, in particular)."

Here's a WD .pdf showing the single drive configuration
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/2579-001037.pdf


--
Mike Easter

On Sat, 12 Nov 2011 15:35:12 -0500, "Don Phillipson" wrote:

| "Larc" wrote in message
| ...
|
| My plan is to use the SATA as my main HDD (C: and E and the old WD ATA
| slave that's
| still OK for the paging file and non-essential data (D: and F. Just
| want to make
| sure setting up the second drive (old slave) as "master with no slave" on
| the ATA
| port is the best way to go. It will be on that ATA port by itself.
|
| Jumper settings are probably printed on (or embossed into) the case of the
| drive. For master or solo, default setting on 10-pin ATA drives is no
| jumper

No problems in that area or at all. Everything went smoothly. I finally talked with
somebody who had done the same thing. He suggested that I install without the second
drive connected since XP would probably try to assign C: to it if it were there. When
I reconnected it afterward, drive letter assignments fell right into the D: and F:
slots I'd left for it.

Thanks to all for the suggestions.

Larc

On Nov 12, 3:06 pm, Larc wrote:
Looking for confirmation I'm doing the right things. Otherwise, suggestions...

The ATA master on my second computer died suddenly. Of course, it had to be that and
not the nearly empty slave. I'm kicking myself for putting off switching to a much
newer SATA drive that's been gathering dust because now I'll have do much more work.
My plan is to use the SATA as my main HDD (C: and E and the old WD ATA slave that's
still OK for the paging file and non-essential data (D: and F. Just want to make
sure setting up the second drive (old slave) as "master with no slave" on the ATA
port is the best way to go. It will be on that ATA port by itself.

Thanks!

Larc

Provided your BIOS is "endowed" about what gets selected for booting,
recognized by a Windows install, etc. I've an older ASUS S478/P4
running SATA-installed Windows XP. Nifty thing is there was no pain,
(no RAID) or bothersome driver requests, with Windows going that way.
Not sure how ASUS managed that. OTH, my Gigabyte MB flips out Windows
XP if there's anything to do with its SATA ports. There's no way I
could squeeze by with an image rewrite from PATA SATA without going
off to total BSOD.

Next is to test for a valid "Boot From CD" when the next instance of a
rescue DOS boot image is required. Check if it'll do it off the
second channel, SATA or controller cards. I prefer Cable Select
jumper settings and position the drives accordingly. Any issues there
should be pretty much related to some older hardware, and be sure any
PATA cables are of the newer strands for handling faster PIO modes.

I don't keep a swap file around. There's a setting in Xtra-Settings
for XP to turn off the swap file at the same time as the computer.
Sort of like clearing the cache and cookies on a browser restart.
With SATA/PATA adaptors the sky should be limit, although gravity
sucks because things never seems to work out that way. Test them with
binary backups for what works, get all the drives and various program/
partition links reestablished, and do a fresh binary when everything
is satisfactorily hunky-dory.

On Sat, 12 Nov 2011 15:06:08 -0500, Larc
wrote:

Looking for confirmation I'm doing the right things. Otherwise, suggestions...

The ATA master on my second computer died suddenly. Of course, it had to be that and
not the nearly empty slave. I'm kicking myself for putting off switching to a much
newer SATA drive that's been gathering dust because now I'll have do much more work.
My plan is to use the SATA as my main HDD (C: and E and the old WD ATA slave that's
still OK for the paging file and non-essential data (D: and F. Just want to make
sure setting up the second drive (old slave) as "master with no slave" on the ATA
port is the best way to go. It will be on that ATA port by itself.
Since you want to replace the system disk I suggest that you use a
SATA to PATA converter such as the Addonics ADIDESA as described on:
http://www.addonics.com/products/adidesa.php

I suggest this to avoid problems with Windows seeing a different type
of disk connection and therefore not being able to boot, even though
the system already could use SATA drives. You may also have some
licensed software that may refuse to run if you switch disk types
or even disk size. (You may be out of luck if the serial number or
model of the drive is checked.)

Before going with my suggestion of using a converter, and if you
decide to use a higher capacity drive, make sure that the PATA
controller works with drives of that size. (Aside from very old
stuff with much lower limits, I've seen limits of 128GB, 512GB,
and 1TB, besides the expected limit of 2TB.


Thanks!

Larc