HDD and CD burner on same IDE?

Should work fine.. although you may experiance some problems copying data from the ROM sevice to the IDE disk. Nay work, but will probably be pretty slow. Just make sure the jumper is not set to primary / boot device.

Hi AMDThunder,
Sure, you can do that - but the theory is, you shouldn't burn from the harddisk that is on the same controller as the burner.
In a perfect world, the source harddisk and the burner would be on separate controllers. This is similar to having 2 harddisks on the one IDE controller (one master, one slave) where Windows is on the master - in this situation moving the Windows swapfile to the second harddisk will offer no performance benefit at all.
However if you have 2 harddisks, each on its own controller, there is a benefit to moving the swapfile because then Windows can access its programs, and read/write to the swapfile, simultaneously.
So you see, anything on that single IDE controller appears to be one device (from a performance point of view) to the OS, as it cannot access each device simultaneously - it must access them one at a time, either one or the other...
But as long as you are aware that burning from the HD with the burner slaved to it is not ideal, there's no other reason not to do it.
Regards

Jumper the HD master, the optical drive as slave. Set the boot order in the BIOS to give that HD a low priority, and you should be fine

Thanks guys! Was hoping that was the answer. Shouldn't be doing any burning from the old drive. Just want to get some files off of it onto my new drive, then use it for storage.

Another question though. The old drive still has the OS on it. Will this cause any problems, or should I just reformat the partition the OS is on?

I have run a Windows computer with two drives, each with a bootable copy of the OS on it and gotten away with it - but if you can delete the superfluous copy of the OS, that would be better.

Normal for a board with Sata conectors


Literally, yes if they both have IDE connectors


There are 2 ways you can setup your IDE devices: master/slave or cable-select, Set the CD/ROM for master and the CD/DVD/RW for slave using the jumpers.
Or using cable-select you can attach the black connector to the CD/ROM, the gray connector to the Burner and the blue connector to the board.
In your case you could use a CD/ROM as your master and your IDE HDD as your slave assuming the OS is loaded on the HDD.
If using the IDE cable to select the device priority then all jumpers must be set for cable-select, otherwise set 1 device jumper for master and the other device jumper for slave.
You really don't want to use your Burner for playing CD/DVD's so use a CD/ROM with a HDD on the available IDE channel or wait on the Sata drives and do it right...
What you're thinking of doing would require a IDE cable with 4 connections, 1 for the motherboard, 1 for the CD/ROM, 1 for the CD/DVD/Burner and 1 more for your HDD.....such a cable does not exist to the best of my knowledge, but if you build it, maybe they will come.
You could eliminate the CD/ROM but then you couldn't watch movies or you could eliminate the DVD/Burner but then you couldn't record movies or yould eliminate the HDD but then you couldn't load the OS...
now I'm confused, time for my coffee, goodbye.

You will have no problems with the old OS; just dont try and boot with it!

Dead space though, so after a month or so when your happy youve got all the files you need moved to a new location- reformat it and recover the space.

Dude, you confused more than just yourself!

Was only planning to use my old HDD and 1 cd burner/player. I'll get a SATA DVD/CD burner at some point in the future, then swap my IDE burner back to just a regular cd rom. So, just 1 cd device and 1 HDD.

Suferosa: Good to know I can access my old files w/o having to worry about the old OS. I do have 3 partitions set up with the OS being C, then a D and E drive. If I remember correctly, I should be able to reformat just the C drive and leave D and E intact. Correct?

Yup.

As ^ he says, you sure can.

I do this myself; only thing is I have got the balls to do it without backing up all my important data first. Its never gone wrong for me yet- but, computers can be :twisted: Besides, youve got a nice new fat s-ata drive.. give you some time to get all your files in order  

Oh, and just remember, it will no longer be your 'C' partion :wink:

Good call.   Hadn't even thought about that! I'd like to think I would've caught it though. Wait, this is me we're talkin' about here.

One thing though. I can't remember if I partitioned it NTFS or not. Is there an easy way to find out? I'm sure I did, but if I didn't, and the new drive is NTFS, won't it have problems reading the other drive? It's been WAY too long since I've done any of that stuff.

No, that will give you no problems at all. You can have different fomats on different partitions. And as Ive said before, once youve got everything sorted you can have a good clean up of the old drive.

The_OGS: Can you give me a little more detail here? Are you saying I can/should move the swap file to other than my primary HDD? If this will bost performance, I'm all in. If I'm reading you right, and this is the case, it should be nothing more than changing the drive letter association to one on the 2nd drive. At least from what I'm remembering...

Thanks for all of the input, guys. One more day till the rest of my prts arrive...  

Yes. If you have multiple HDs, each on its own controller, move the page file to a different HD.
The benefit is subtle if you have lots of memory but can be quite an improvement if you have only ~512MB. Your system will still swap, but it will do it unnoticed and will no longer pause/freeze while it swaps.
This is a known remedy for old rigs without enough memory - an old HD (ideally 7200RPM with at least 2MB cache) can be installed as master on the second controller, and given a 1024/2048 swapfile.
The burner is then jumpered to be slave on the secondary controller, and you're in business. The HD is without value (basically $10 bucks or whatever) and replaces memory that would be far more expensive or maybe no longer available.
Not as good as real memory, but increased performance is performance...
Again, you shouldn't really burn from the page file disk to the burner (since both are on the same controller).
To adjust page file size and location, go Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance > Advanced > Virtual Memory.
I recommend only 1 permanent swapfile on the other HD and no swapfile on your WinXP drive at all.
L8R

Cool. Thanks for the info. I'd have never thought of it. Old drive is a 5400RPM, but I'll take any performance increase I can get, no matter how small.

Thanks again.
BKJ