swapping drives

[Mombo323]

I have a 20 gig drive with ME on it as Primary Master. I have a another drive as Primary slave with xp Pro on it. I have my choice at boot up. I always choose XP Pro. Can I not just change the jumpers on the drive and swap them Primary for slave and vice versa? That way, I would have the NEW 40 gig drive with XP on it as Primary Master and the 20 gig as slave. Will it still boot up if I do this? Also, would there be any perfomance increase in the new 40 gig drive if I moved it to Primary Master? Thanks

[PC TECH250]

Your main problem is with the master boot record(mbr) where XP made a change during the
installation. If the current primary is set as the first boot device in the bios it would then be
in need of change to accomidate the swap to being a secondary slaved to the XP drive. The
boot order would be assigned to "HD #1" instead of "HD #0" in the bios to see the choice of
OSs to load screen. You would still need to have the current ME primary boot first to see the
option to load either version of Windows. What loads either OS is obviously stored on HD#0
the current master.

A Linux distro known as ubuntu does offer one solution for choosing which OS to load with
the ubuntu boot manager floppy. When booted from this will detect all OSs on all partitions
on all hard drives installed on the system. You simply choose the partition to load where it
then searches for the one or more mbrs. The method of installing both OSs will determine if
the swap will work "as is". If both drives can boot as stand alone on the system the answer
here to boot from either drive set as default is the bios boot order. But the mbr comes into
play if you used ME to install XP to the second drive.

XP is a much faster OS then ME. So choosing it as the default OS means a faster load to go
to the desktop as a rule. If both drives run at one speed such as either 5200 or 7200rpm a
performance increase would be seen only between the two versions of Windows for access
time to data on the drives installed. To see if either version of Windows will load by itself as
a stand alone you would simply disconnect the other drive. If the second drive with XP Pro
on it failed to be detected by the bios you would then set it to the cable select jumper set.

[JPMiller]

Wrong thread...

[PC TECH250]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JPMiller

Wrong thread...

It must have been. Mombo323 wants to dual boot OSs with the current dirves.