how do you make a double hardrive computer?

can any one help me? And tell me how to make a double hardrive computer

alright. on the harddrive that you want as the one the computer boots up from you set the jumper on the back of the harddrive as master and plug that into ide1 channel on your mobo. for the second harddrive i put mine onto the ide1 controller on the mobo and set the jumper settings to slave.


sorry if i dont make much sense. im kinda in a hurry. hopefully that helps somewhat. if you do need any help email me and i will try to help you a bit better.

Assuming you don't mean RAID, and know how to make a computer with one hdd:
Once you have it set up, put in the second hdd, attached to the same ide channel as the first. Put the jumpers on the original hdd to "master" if they weren't already, and set the jumpers on the 2nd hdd to "slave".

Then when you reboot the new drive should be detected in bios. When you get into windows, go into disk management (in the Administrative tools) and partition and format the disk.

Voila, you should now have 2 hdd.

you mean the companies don't format new drives for you? and what exactly does it mean to partition? if you raid0 two WD 80GB ATA/100 drives, does that mean you get the performance of 200.0 MB/s? or is it only marginally effective? cuz if two of those are available for $62 a piece, then you ultimately get 160 gigs of space for only $124, where a WD 160GB SATA going for $109 saves you a few bucks, but is it only 75% effective compared to the raid array, karsh? or would putting two WD 80GB SATA drives together for a total $142 be better?

No, when you get a new drive it is not formatted (since there are multiple formats, how would they know what you want?) Partitioning is essentially choosing the drive letters and sizes. ie, if your current computer has just a C: drive, that is one partition. If you have a C: and D: drive letter, but only one physical disk, then that physical disk has been made into two partitions, or logical sections.

A raid0 array won't quite double the throughput, but it would be significantly higher than a single drive (though not 200mb/s, since the ata100 drives can't usually put out 100mb/s either, thats a theoretical max). Raid performance will depend on the drives, and what type of raid controller you have, but the two 80gb SATA drives will outperform the single 160gb drive by a substantial margin. Whether your useage needs such performance, and is worth the hassle of setting up raid is something you have to decide yourself.

constant_fie... maybe you are confused. Formatting does not exdactly mean "emptying"... it means to set it up for a specific file format. (NTFS, FAT32...)

(^^;?( What a mess! )

He must drive a mouse before tricycle... Well whatever... don't really need to know it anyways!

yea that was it what do the different file formats do? and which is most common?

They are different ways of structuring and keeping track of data.
NTFS is the newest, and works best for new large drives. The upcoming Longhorn OS will introduce a new file system, winFS.

I have a question related to the two hardrive thingy .

I have a hardrive which a virus has hit and wrecked my Winxp from working properly. I took the hardrive out and put it into my other comp to see if i could at least get some files off it. It registers a second hardrive there as letter e:\ but when I double click it in explorer it says would you like to format it. Obviously no as I really would like those files back.

Any ideas how to get files off a hardrive with no fully working OS.

Thank you all very much

(^^;(Prowler, It is often the case that the different OS can't recognize format correctly even it is the same XP)

There seems to be Geometry so called on every HDD which is changed when in different configuration.

Linux fdisk can deal with geometry, but I haven't experimented it.

You cannot but try other OSs, DOS with ntfs-dos, Win98 with ntfs for win98, W2K, Linux (Knoppix or so).

Be careful with this infected drive, if you haven't removed the virus completely it will most likely infect the new computer as well, unless you're using linux. Try knoppix, that might be your best bet.