Dual hard drive question

T

tlee2951

New member
I just noticed something strange with my DAW hard drive configuration and I'm wondering if anyone can tell me if it's a problem.

I have a basic dual HD setup (WinXP) with my OS, apps, etc. on drive C and audio on a separate drive E:. I recently had problems with my E drive crashing, luckily I was backed up and was able to recover most everything I needed. (Many thanks to those on this forum who helped me out with that issue awhile ago.)

Anyway the thing I'm wondering about is this: When I go into ControlPanel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management and look at my 2 Disk drives my Audio drive (E) shows up as Disk 0 and my C drive as Disk 1. This seems backwards from what one would normally expect.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine who thought he had heard that this was bad and might be related to the E drive problems I had and that I should switch the disk cables around and make sure the BIOS was set to boot from disk 0. This guy didn't have a whole lot of explanation why this was bad, just that he thought he had heard somewhere it could be a problem.

Just wondering if any of the computer experts on the BBS might have additional insight into whether this is something worth worrying about. I ran for about 9 months in this configuration without problems an I'm hesitant to play around with disk cables and BIOS settings without good reason (always afraid I might make things worse than before).

Thanks in advance.
 
could be your IDE cables are backwards if your using both Chls.
if your hesitant as you say to get in there and play around..... and have been working with good performance then leave well enough alone.
 
You could possibly have either the cables connected incorrectly and/or the jumpers on the hard drives set wrong. Your Master drive "C" should be located at the furthest connection on the cable. The jumpers on it should be set to "Master" or "CS - Cable Select". Your Slave drive should be connected to the connector in the middle of the ribbon cable and have it's jumpers set to "Slave" or "CS - Cable Select".

The above is if you have both hard drives connected to the same IDE channel. I would personally set each hard drive as "Master" and connect them as "masters" on each seperate IDE channel.
 
You will get better performance if you put each hard drive on a different IDE channel.

Put your C drive as master on the IDE 0 cable. Put your second drive as master on the IDE 1 cable. Then put any CD ROM device as slave on either IDE 0 or IDE 1.

Ed
 
Most current BIOS's allow you to specify which IDE channel contains the boot drive, so this is not so much of an issue unless you haven't specified the proper channel (in this case ... the computer wont boot or boot time will be increased due to the BIOS searching for the boot drive).
In what ever configuration you use, I would recommend the audio only drive to be on a channel by it's self.
 
Of course you can only boot off the drive that's bootable... so switching cables would just cause the machine to not boot.
 
Thanks everyone for all the information and suggestions. If I remember correctly each drive is configured as master on separate IDE channels. I think I'll peel the skins and double check how I've got things cabled and maybe experiment a bit. I figure I can always put things back the way they were originally if I run into trouble.
 
Question?

I have been thinking of going with dual hard-drives as well. My question, is it possible to switch hard-drives (i.e. to run windows from either hard-drives)? If possible, I would like to have one hard-drive for personal use while the other one would be just to run windows and my music software. Also I run an M-box (external harware that replaces my soundcard for those of you who haven't heard of this).

Any input or suggestions on this would be much appreciated!


2.8 Ghz P4 processor / ASUS P4P 800SE / Windows XP Pro / 120GB S-ATA / 512MB SDRAM / M-Box / Pro Tools LE
 
Yes it's possible. You just need to configure a dual boot setup.
You can even configure the dual boot on a single hard drive by creating separate partitions for each instance of the OS.
Bet you can find more info here.
 
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