master/slave question

i have a tripple boot system with linux on my primary ide set to master and w2k (c partition) + xp (k partition) on my primary ide set to slave,

i'm not really happy with this set up, if my slave drive fails then i lose 2 systems

can i add a hdd to my secondary ide ?
if so - should it be master or slave

 

If you have a space available on your IDE cable then you can add an extra hard drive. Choosing between master and slave is not important as long as one device on the cable is master and one is slave. (I assume you have a CD/DVD drive hooked up to the second IDE cable)

 

i have 2 ide cd/dvd dives and was thinking about unhooking one and adding a hdd in its place,

i do quite a bit of booting from live cd as well so i need to keep 1 cd/dvd drive as 2nd boot device (floppy is 1st) - would this make any difference to the master/slave settings ?

this is not a problem - just saves me a lot of fiddling, booting and rebooting

 

Just had to reply and hope that I don't sound condescending! You can add a hard drive to your present hard drive's IDE cable, just make sure that you jumper it as a slave, provided that you have an empty drive bay and depending on what you want to use it for. You could also add a hard drive to the IDE ribbon cable going to your CD/DVD drives, if you unplug one of them.

At present, all of your OS's are located on the C: drive. Even though they are located on different partitions of the same hard drive ( unless I read your post wrong ), and in the event of a hard drive failure, you would lose everything and not just what you are considering slave drives.

Just wanted to explain what I saw as a misconception and hope that it helps!

 

thanks but you have my system wrong,

my master drive on my primary ide has a 40gb hdd with mandriva linux installed

my slave drive on my primary ide has a 250gb hdd with 6 partitions -
on the first partition which is C (20gb) is windows 2000,
on the second partition which is K (20gb) is windows xp

so my primary ide has 2 hdd's, if my slave drive fails then i lose windows 2000 and xp,

just in case - all operating systems are bootable

 

Please pardon my useless reply! :-o If you unplug your master drive on the IDE channel, can you boot from the secondary hard drive?

 

pardoned nicely:-D:-D

 

yes i can,
if i set the jumper to master and change the hdd in my bios then windows does not know that linux has been there - and i just dual boot w2k and xp

 

Thanks for your quick reply! I didn't realize that you had jumpered the drives from master to slave after installing the OS's. You shouldn't have any problem on doing the same on the secondary IDE channel, just leave the CD/DVD rom device as the master, and change jumpers when needed!

 

thanks - thats what i was hoping, saves me a lot of messing,

i also had a thought - i can choose my boot drive via F11 (i forgot i could do this:-orolleyes) so i wasted valuable thinking time:-D