[Ive_Defected]

Ok I have two HDs with XP on them (the same XP) and i was wondering if and how i could make one of them a slave...would somehting happen to my main if i connected both?

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check out the manufacturers website for the drive you want to be slave, and set the pins accordingly. then, pop it in and the computer should recognise it automatically as a slave. of course, you might have to wipe the drive, but i'm pretty sure that if you set is as slave, it should be fine. I haven't done this with two XP drives before, i have only added a 2000 drive to an XP computer, so I may be wrong, but its worth a try...

[halfwaynowhere]

check out the manufacturers website for the drive you want to be slave, and set the pins accordingly. then, pop it in and the computer should recognise it automatically as a slave. of course, you might have to wipe the drive, but i'm pretty sure that if you set is as slave, it should be fine. I haven't done this with two XP drives before, i have only added a 2000 drive to an XP computer, so I may be wrong, but its worth a try...

[macten]

Better wait for a mod to respond but I'll bet it's ok.....

[Tim Wellman]

There would be no problem if the C drive on your computer remains the same one the XP os was registered with with Microsoft... the one thing you can't do is use a harddrive with XP on it on a different computer...

But, if your c drive remains the one that was registered with that motherboard, you can add any other hd as a slave... the second install of XP would be wasted, of course, just taking up space on the harddrive, but there would be no conflicts with the hardware itself. The slave would be assigned a different drive letter, and all your programs on the C drive would continue to work. However, if you have programs also on the drive you want to be a slave, they would no longer work for the most part, since all those programs would be searching for dll's and reg files in the c:\windows directory... which would be pointing to the master drive C now.

Of course, the best thing to do, is to simply reformat the slave drive once installed, since the other install of XP would be wasted space, along with any programs installed on it that required access to the main windows folder.

The only case I can think of where you'd want to keep it is if you plan a temporary install into another computer to copy some files, then putting the slave drive back into it's original computer. That should also work, but XP will probably recognize the drive as a new drive and reinstall the driver when you reinstall it in the old computer... which would just require a reboot afterwards

[Ive_Defected]

ok excellent thanks guys...quick question...what would be the easiest (read fastest,cheapest ) way to wipe that second drive of XP...?

[Tim Wellman]

once it's installed on your computer as a slave drive, you can just open My Computer, right click on it's icon, and choose to Format it... drive wiped :-) Just make sure you don't want anything on there first.

[Ive_Defected]

awesome...you guys rock...thank you.