Adding hard drive, have some questions.

[Guest]

I've got a bunch of questions I was hoping someone can answer. I'm adding an Ultra-ATA 100 hard drive to my system. I've got an Abit KT-7 raid board that will support up to 8 ide devices. Right now I've got two ata-33 hard drives on the standard ide connector and two cd-roms on the other standard ide conector. I'm going to put the Ultra on the ATA-100 ide connector. So far, thats not a problem. (I haven't actually done anything yet, I'm just getting ready).

Now here are my questions. Basically I don't want to have to reformat my current drives because they have a lot of things on them. However, I want the Ultra-ATA drive to be my primary drive. So basically I want it to be the C: drive as well as D,E,F,G,H,I,J (I'm thinking of partitioning the new 40 gig drive into 8 partitions). That means my current C,D,E, and F drives need their drive letters changed to K,L,M, and N. So how do I go about doing this?

My next question is how do I make sure that the Ultra-ATA drive becomes my boot drive when it is on the IDE-3 connector (IDE-3 and IDE-4 are the Ultra-ATA 100 connectors)?

Question 3. It's been a while since I've done this formatting and setting up. I know I need to use FDISK and Format commends. I can't remember how to set this up so that it is formatted as FAT32. Will I be given an option when I format?

Also, is there a way to copy all the contents and settings etc. of my current c: drive to the new drive so that I won't have to reinstall all the drives, system files, etc.?

If there is anything else I've forgotten, then let me know also. Thanks.

 

[Guest]

I reciently a older segate 7200 rpm drive with one of the new Maxtor 7200s ..
was mostly a snap.. the Maxtor comes with a dos disk that does disk copy or xcopy or something .. anyway..then made the new drive, with 4 new partitions, my boot drive.
Reformatted my old segate & now use it for .doc backup..

oh, the new maxtor is way faster & real quite.

 

[Guest]

Here's the way I'd do it with fdisk to achieve what you are asking to do off of those controllers. It doesn't mean it's the way I think you should or it's they way I would set it up with that hardware.

First of all understand you can not assign extendend partitions drive letters before primary partions. Win9X will give precedence in assigning drive letters to primary partitions. Likewise Win9x will give precedence to hard drives over removalble media. (YOu might can do it with a third party program like Partition Magic. I'm not sure.. I guess you could look into it if you really wanted all the drive letters together to be on the ATA 100 drive). But with just fdisk and windows if set up properly in the bios and partitioned correctly, it would be about like this.

(ATA100 RAID controller: primary)
ATA 100 drive master (1 primary, 7 extended):
C,F,G,H,I,J,K,L

(onboard controller: primary)
ATA 33 drive master (1 primary): D
CD-Rom slave: M

(onboard controller: secondary)
ATA 33 drive master (1 primary): E
CD-Rom slave: N

How to do that? I'm going to assume you want to do a clean install on the primary of the new drive. You don't have to but I'm assuming you want all those partitions so you can separate your programs. Even if you XCOPY32 your boot drive, you can't just move those programs into the new partition after copying unless you want to deal with the broken shortcuts that that will create. So I'm assuming your current drives have saved data that can be used when you reinstall the programs over.

Disconnect all the old drives. Set the new drive as a master on the RAID controller and configure that in the RAID bios. Check the manual for how to do that. (if you can not run one drive off these Raid controllers, funny I don't really know cause I've never tried one drive. You may find you have to set up a Raid with the two ATA 33 drives.. which could be done after data that is pertinent is removed. But you probably can run one drive off these) Now boot with a boot disk that has fdisk and format (preferably one that supports FAT32). Run fdisk. Now create a primary for the new drive.. assign 5g (it will ask if you want to assign all of the drive space to the primary and set it active.. say no).. then create 7 extended partitions assinging 5g of the logical dos drive to each as you go (just follow what the program ask you). Now set the primary (1st partition) as active.

Now reboot. format the D with paramet /s "format d: /s". Format the rest of the extended partitions with no parameters. Shut down the system.

Set up the old drives and CD-Roms the way they were. Connect the new drive to the ATA 100 IDE 1 controller as a master. Boot up. Go into the bios immediately. Recognize all your old drives. Set the boot sequence option (see mb manual for where it is specifically) in the bios as RAid, floppy, etc or floppy, Raid, etc.. or whatever combo the bios offers. But you want the RAID controller to be first or after the floppy.

It's a regular Windows 9X installation from there. Windows will automatically set up your drive letters accordingly as above if you boot from the raid controller with the new drive.

If you are looking to just swap the data from C: to the primary partition of the new drive. Do everything above but just leave the C drive in. When you start fdisk you need to switch working drive to #2. As #1 will be the C drive. When you are done formatting the new drive's partitions, reboot into Windows from the C drive. Open a dos box in Windows, do this only from a Windows dos box.
type "XCOPY32 C:\*.* D:\*.* /s/c/h/e/r/k"
this will move everything safely to the new primary partition.. assuming everything on C: isn't over 5g. But again, if you simply move program folders to new partitions after copying everything to the new drive.. that may not only mess up shortcuts.. it may play some havic in some of your registry settings. Best to clean install and used saved data on the old drives for newly installed programs.