CDRLabs.com

I copied this "thread" I had posted in another forum,,and didnt receive any responses, so thought I'd try here, to see if I received any suggestions.

Dual Boot question,pertaining to master/slave hookup...
Sometime in the next few days, I am going to fix my brother up witha dual boot system..He has windows 98 on his old harddrive, but wanted to try Windows XP, so he purchased an additonal harddrive to do this on. Newt has already covered(I think pretty well), what I need to do to set up the dual boot system. My question was where to install the new harddrive. He currantly has his present hard drive as master on IDE1, along with a CD rom as slave on IDE1. He has a DVDburner as secondary master on IDE2, along with a CDburner as secondary slave on IDE2. I am going to remove his CDrom, and install his CDburner as the primary slave on IDE1. Now,,where should I place the new harddrive, either at secondary master or secondary slave on IDE2. Bear in mind that he wishes to copy CD's on the fly, thus the reason for moving the CD burner to IDE1. Any ideas?
thanks,
coadman

You could try to get a decent add on IDE card for the HD's or maybe the opticals if youcan find one that supports them and do it htat way if he has enough free slots.
I run all my HD's on the RAID controller of my MSI has singles and they work fine that way. All of my optical drives are on the regular IDE/133 controller and also work good there.
My controllers are all full and I even have a SCSI card and it all seems to work fine, at least with XP Pro. I run my main DVD burner as master on one and my DVD reader as master on the other with my extra cdrw and dvd burner as slaves to the first 2. I can do 8x dvd burns on the fly with a clean, small enough, disk.

I would install both HD's on Primary channel then DVD writer as Master and CD writer as slave on Secondary channel.Another alternative for the CD-ROM is put it in a external Firewire/USB2.0 enclosure or get rid of it.

burninfool wrote:I would install both HD's on Primary channel then DVD writer as Master and CD writer as slave on Secondary channel.Another alternative for the CD-ROM is put it in a external Firewire/USB2.0 enclosure or get rid of it.

I think he will do away with the CD-ROM. This looks like a simple enough setup, but will he still be able to record CD's "on the fly" ?
thanks,
coadman

coadman wrote:Newt has already covered(I think pretty well), what I need to do to set up the dual boot system.

???
what do you mean by this sentence?
i need some info on dual-booting too (i wanna set up something like that) can you explain?

dodecahedron wrote:

coadman wrote:Newt has already covered(I think pretty well), what I need to do to set up the dual boot system.

???
what do you mean by this sentence?
i need some info on dual-booting too (i wanna set up something like that) can you explain?

"Newt" in another forum provided me with this answer,,I don't think he would mind me placing it here,,,as it is "only his opinion"

Lets assume you have your 98 load on C: and a CD drive labeled as D:

When you put in the XP install CD it will do a bit of this and that then bring you to a screen where you choose the drive where you want XP loaded. It should offer the choice of C: or F: (since the CD drive is not available).

Choose F: and make the partition there any size you want from 10Gb (about the minimum I'd ever put the XP OS on) to the full size of the drive. When you format the partition you'll have a choice of FAT32 or NTFS. Either one will be able to 'see' the 98 load but the 98 load will not be able to see a partition formatted NTFS. Usually not a problem and for me, NTFS is a better option since I think it is more stable and certainly has more security features. Other folks prefer to have it as FAT32. Your choice and either will work fine but if you go with FAT32 you will have quite a bit less effective storage space on the drive. Probably only about 2/3 as much as with NTFS.

When the XP install completes you will have a dual boot system and every time you start the PC you'll have the option to start in 98 or XP. The bulk of the XP files will be on F: although it will put a few system files on C: and will modify C: slightly to suit it's needs. Nothing you'll normally notice though.

Down the road if you want to just have XP, you can simply delete the 98 OS pieces and delete one line from the boot file to remove the 98 option since it would no longer work.


__________________

coadman

thanks.
i was just asking for a link!

you might be interested in this too:
advice i got from robertb about dual-booting:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=13812
most particularly:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic. ... 0769#90769