Need some help with my HD set ups please

[Discord]

sorry: already posted in general homebuild - but tis is prolly the better place for it..

Ok, I've built my new PC: sorry, this may be long but I really could use some help!

Conroe E6600
Asus P5WDH Deluxe
Seagate Barracuda SataII 320gb {not using a raid set up yet}
Corsair Twinx PC6400

I'm putting my old HDD in the pc {Maxtor Diamond Ata 133 - think it's UDMA?} and have a DVD and CD players {could bin the CD player really - but it fills a hole!}

Spent ages deciding which of the IDE controllers to use for the old ATA HDD and the optical drives either the South Bridge {which the manual terms as E-IDE or the JMicron. Finally ended up deciding it didn't matter!!

Please confirm this - I have to admit my main reason for this decision is that the cable for my optical drives wouldn't reach if I put them in one of the controllers - can't remember which..

Ok, so that seemed to work. Booted from CD and created a new partition on the new SATA drive and installed XP. Everything worked fine until I noticed in Windows that my old drive was still labelled as C and my new drives partition {now the system} was F {as there are other partitions on the old drive}

How can I avoid / fix this. I really want my new HD to be partioned into C & D..

I'm thinking I may need to take out the old HD to install XP - therefore it will have no reason to call my new partition F!! Then, after installation, put the second drive back in so I can transfer the data across.

Please help!

 

[misry]

Unless you have partition magic or another utility of that type, just reinstall windows to the SATA drive without the PATA drive in place. Once installed you just plug the PATA back in and it'll be assigned the next available drive letter.

 

[Zenthar]

I'm thinking I may need to take out the old HD to install XP - therefore it will have no reason to call my new partition F!! Then, after installation, put the second drive back in so I can transfer the data across.

That would work, that is how I've been doing it ever since my A7N8X mobo. I regularly check forums to see if there is a better way to do it and never found any, if anyone knows better, let us know.

 

[Discord]

Many thanks.

I'll give that ago. I think I should have thought about it a bit more before installing XP! Was in a hurry to get my PC up and running though!

I assume I was right that it doesn't really matter which controlled I use for the IDE and optical drives. Phew

 

[Doughbuy]

Might want to try fooling around with Disk Management to see if you could change the drive paths. I've done that with External drives, haven't tried with internal, but you might as well give it a shot.