Q re Using 2 Hard Drives

Quote from Babak:

The new drive shows up as "Disk 0, unkown 74.53 Gb Online unallocated".
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My sata drive shows up as "Disk X, Basic, XXX GB, Online".

The fact that your shows up as unknown (rather than basic or dynamic) may be a big clue as to why you can't partition it.

If you right-click it where it says disk 0, what choices do you have? (I'm used to XP, not sure what W2K looks like)
 
Quote from nononsense:

With a tool like PartitionMagic or Acronis Disk Manager you can do this.
Even under the active - OS, you can (re-)partition your OS drive any way you want.
Except if you want to modify your partition holding the OS itself. Here you can only enlarge it provided you have the free space to do this.

If you would manage to run the partitioning tool from another OS - self booting CD or floppy - you could do anything you want, provided you are prepared to adapt your boot control file (for XP: boot.ini) as required. This is a bit more delicate though.
Note that deleting or creating non-OS partitions 'ahead' of your OS partition may also require adaptation of your boot file.

If you are not sure about all this, better don't try without adequate backups!

nononsense
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You are right nononsense. I am aware of PartitionMagic. I'm assuming that Babak doesn't have that and won't need to repartition on the fly.
 
Quote from winter:

All SATA drives are considered master, there are no slaves (one drive per cable). Also you partition before you format, not the other way around.
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IMHO, that's why you should partition, format and install a new system on it. The old ATA drive will not be able to boot with the SATA connected.
 
Quote from nononsense:

IMHO, that's why you should partition, format and install a new system on it. The old ATA drive will not be able to boot with the SATA connected.
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Huh? That is exactly what the OP is doing currently (booting from his old drive with the SATA drive attached)

FWIW, I am running a system with both an ATA and SATA drive attached and booting from the ATA drive. You should be able to configure which one you are booting from via the BIOS config.
 
Quote from winter:

Huh? That is exactly what the OP is doing currently (booting from his old drive with the SATA drive attached)

FWIW, I am running a system with both an ATA and SATA drive attached and booting from the ATA drive. You should be able to configure which one you are booting from via the BIOS config.
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Hi winter,
I never had a system with both a SATA and an ATA drive. From your comment pointing out that the SATA will impose itself as master drive, I thought that you might not be able to change this. I seem to have read something like that someplace.

I'm glad you told me because I was thinking to add a SATA drive in one of my systems.

nononsense
 
Quote from nononsense:

I never had a system with both a SATA and an ATA drive. From your comment pointing out that the SATA will impose itself as master drive, I thought that you might not be able to change this. I seem to have read something like that someplace.

I'm glad you told me because I was thinking to add a SATA drive in one of my systems.
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No problem.

Actually I'm not sure what Babak meant when he said "it is already set as master btw" since SATA drives arent master/slave. Maybe he meant its attached to the first SATA connector on the motherboard (which could be labeled master) Who knows...

Anyway it works fine (ATA with SATA) on my Dell 400SC
 
Quote from winter:

Actually I'm not sure what Babak meant when he said "it is already set as master btw" since SATA drives arent master/slave. Maybe he meant its attached to the first SATA connector on the motherboard (which could be labeled master) Who knows...
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Well, take whatever I say with a grain of salt guys :p I'm not very tech savy. I said that it was set to master because that's what they told me they would do at the shop. That is, put the new drive in and keep the old one but set the new as master and old as slave.
 
IMPORTANT UPDATE !!

w00t !

ok now I just right clicked on the little icon space and must have clicked something since now it says 'Basic' instead of unknown (!)

And now I have the option of partitioning it (its not greyed out anymore).

But I'm curious now, what does is the difference between Basic and Dynamic? I'd like to know before I start to partition, format, etc....

Thanks guys :)
 
Quote from Babak:

ok now I just right clicked on the little icon space and must have clicked something since now it says 'Basic' instead of unknown (!)

And now I have the option of partitioning it (its not greyed out anymore).

But I'm curious now, what does is the difference between Basic and Dynamic? I'd like to know before I start to partition, format, etc....
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Great - glad to hear its working now.

Here is some reading material:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314343
Basic Storage Versus Dynamic Storage in Windows XP
 
I also have both sata and ata drives in 2 machines running xp pro. I use casper xp to copy back and forth between drives in same machne and the bios to boot from either one. No problems for couple yrs now.
 
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