2 bootable and same op sys hd`s on same channel; front bus 66

[levifler]

Hi all, I am new to this, so please bear with me, tho i have learned alot this week reading my m/b manual and various web sites. I have several questions so I will get on with it.
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I have a 3gig hd capable of PIO mode 4 transfers, a cdrom and a cdrw in my system.
My m/b can handle ultra dma/33 transfers. The m/b has 2 IDE channels capable of 2 drives each. The op sys is win98v1. I just ordered a 20g IDE hd capable of ultra dma/100.
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My plan is to install the 20g as a slave, create an image of the 3g onto the 20g, then make the 20g the master and the 3g the slave. The 20g would then be the primary boot partition.

If this seems like an ok plan, is it suggested (if possible) to leave the slave 3g as a bootable drive with the same op sys on it? Any drawbacks?

Assuming the 20g is drive C, and the 3g is drive D, I would have the boot sequence A,C,D,cdrom.

Also, i will apparently need to use western digital's ez-bios software because the bios doesn't support hd`s over 8.4. According to my mb manufacturer (QDI, www.qdigrp.com) (http://www.qdigrp.com)) website, the board can't handle it because of the tx chipset. (QDI titanium IB PI430TX, Intel 82439 TX). The bios upgrade they offer apparently doesn't address this.
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Unrelated question: Is there a way of bumping my front bus speed of 66 up to pc100?
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Thanks for any consideration, levifler

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Saddest irony of all : Lonely people in big cities.

[mjc]

Your board is old enough that it probably doesn't support independent timings for the IDE devices, so if you make the 3GB the slave on the primary cahnnel all you will get speedwise is PIO4, the 20GB will only go ATA/33 (max) anyway (that is as fast as your board will go), If I were doing this I'd grab an ATA100 card and then you wouldn't have to worry abotu speed or the the lack of BIOS support for large drives...

I would aslo make the boot order C, A and then whatever else (that minimizes the risks of a virus infected floppy from booting your machine, plus it can shave a few seconds off the boot time because the BIOS doesn't have to check the floppy first).

FSB is basically a fixed thing on most older boards...some have jumpwer to change it but if yours does you probably would be overclocking every thing, newer boards have up to three multipliers for cutting back the speed to the PCI bus (1/4 for 133MHz, 1/3 for 100 and 1/2 fo 66), yours is likely to have just the 1/2.

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mjc
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