Designating a master drive

[rjacksonphoto]

I can't seem to find the answer to this through Google and this forum was

helpful when I had a similar question before, so, here goes...

 

I was running out of room on my main drive, so I followed advice I got here

and ghosted the contents of my internal 120gb drive to an external 200gb

drive. This was accomplished without problems with Norton Ghost. I then

ghosted the contents of my 20gb main (master?) drive with Windows and my OS to

my 120gb internal drive, utilizing Casper 3.0. Again, no problem. Now, I

have the same content on both the 20gb and the 120gb drives. What I'd like to

do is make the computer boot up from the 120gb drive rather than the full 20gb

drive. How do I do this? It seems like it ought to be easy, but I can't find

the answer anywhere. How do I designate the 120gb drive as the master or main

drive? I tried deleting the contents of the 20gb drive but, of course, was

informed by my computer that I couldn't do that...

 

Does this make any sense?

 

Thanks.

[tobiasfeltus]

I think it is a stimple matter of changing the boot order in the BIOS settings. and i dont think that can do any harm, as long as you take note of what they are to start with, to revert to if needed.

 

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[Ed_Ingold]

If you have IDE drives, you have two IDE ports and up to two drives on each port (with a flat cable). You must have a bootable drive on port 1. If there are two drives on that cable, one must be set as a MASTER and the other as a SLAVE using the jumpers, or are cable-selected. See you manual for other options.

 

The new drive must be "bootable", with the necessary system files. Again, consult your manual.

 

Finally, the BIOS must be set to recognize the new drive in the correct position. The procedure can be highly automatic or completely manual, depending on your mother board and BIOS. (Did I say, see your manual?)

[frank_skomial]

What multiple boot management software do you use? What kind of disks are they ? is there a master - slave assignment by jumpers on the disks ? Can you afford to reposition jumpers or disk controller cables? Too soon to provide precise answer...

 

If you ghosted with Norton, why did you use Casper ?

 

Were the destination disks empty before you started ghosting to? - that is, was the boot sector not accupied by anything and free to install the boot software there ? How Norton or Casper will behave if there is no room in the boot sector ?

[steven_clark]

It should probably just be a matter of swapping the 120gb drive to the same cable postion the 20gb drive used to be in and making sure the jumpers are set correctly. That said this might end up being one of those situations where windows gets too smart for you.

[rjacksonphoto]

I think it's pretty obvious that Windows is too smart for me... I used Casper because Ghost wouldn't ghost the C drive to the D drive while Windows was open. I tried doing it in recovery mode via the Norton CD but couldn't figure it out once I got into the mode. Read on an old forum that Casper was more user friendly so tried it and I agree. Also, Ghost would not allow me to check the box to use drive D for the master boot record.

 

All of the drives were empty before ghosting. I can't find my manual (I can find the manual from the computer prior to this one, of course), downloaded the manual but currently the web pages it needs are unavailable ("try again later").

 

I think I'll crack her open and try swapping the drives, etc.

 

Boy, computer stuff sucks. Give me a simple case of diabetic ketoacidosis or hypercapneic respiratory failure to manage any day. You know, something simple...;-)

[kelly_flanigan1]

Here I just would have installed the 120Gig drive as slave, and made a 20 to 40 gig bootable partion for programs, and several logical drives for data, using the HDA makers install disc. Then I just just use the HDA install disc to copy the old 20 gig's OS,programs & data to the new 20 to 40 gig first logal drive on the 120gig unit. Then I stop the computer, pull out the OLD master 20 gig HDA, and install the 120 gig hda as master on the cable . With a modern controller and cable the cables select jumper works. I have done this on many many dozens of upgrades with no hitches. You really want to keep an orderly computer, and know where your data, programs are.