The basics of installing more than 4 IDE devices in a system?

[joea64]

I have a perfectly good 13GB 5400RPM Seagate drive that used to be the secondary HD in my system but which I pulled in late May to replace with the Western Digital 40GB 5400RPMthat currently does duty as the secondary (the primary is a Maxtor 20GB 7200RPM). I have the idea of putting the 13GB back into the system so that I can have 3 hard drives (and a platform for running other OS'es), but both of my IDE channels are already full up - the primary (ATA100) with the two existing HD's, and the secondary (ATA33) with my DVD and CDRW drives (master and slave, respectively).

As best I understand, the best way to go about doing what I would like to do is to get an interface card such as Maxtor's ATA100 and ATA133 PCI cards, plug that in, and connect the drives. How would I best do that while maintaining the current drive setups and (hopefully) the drive letter assignments?

-Joe-

[Rick]

The drive letter assignment is easy
Partition the drives you intend to add to the system as extended partitions Not Primary dos partitions

I am not familiar with the two cards you have listed .
Check the web site for the card
ensure that they will support being added and additional ports and NOT require being the primary ports for your drives

Install the card you decide on as additional ports
add the HDD’s you want to add up to 4 additional as extended partitions and the drive letters should fall in between your HDD and the first CD/dvd drive letter

[rond36]

How would I best do that while maintaining the current drive setups and (hopefully) the drive letter assignments?

To do this you need to go to device manager and reserve the drive letters assigned to your CD drives.
As long as you only create an extended DOS partition and drive(s) in the extended partition Windows should assign the added drive(s) after your CD drives. If you create a primary partition it will be placed before any drive in an extended partition and shuffle all the other drives down a letter.

Keep in mind that if you do install another OS the other OS will assign drive letters not reserving the CD drive letters they will be assigned the last two letters after the floppies and hard drives. You could end up with drives assigned one drive letter in one OS and a different one in the other OS. Unless it is Linux but that is a whole other story.

Drive priorities for letter assignment:
First: Floppies reserved letters a and b
Second: Drives in a primary partition
Third: Drives in an extended partition
Fourth: CD drives