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Guest

Guest
OK, I have two hard drives, one is a 20 gb quantum, the other a maxtor 20 gb, both 7200 rpm.

I have win2k installed on one, win98se installed on the other.

My question is: I use the cable select jumper on both hard drives, so that I can switch in bios which hdd i boot from. Is there any problem/danger using the cable select jumpers, or should I use the master/slave jumper settings?

I have been using the cable select for about a month, and have had no problems, but a friend was a little leary about this, so I appreciate your knowledge and insights.

thanks


my system: a800 with swiftech hsf, asus a7v bios 1004, 4in1 4.20, asus v7700 gef2 with asus drivers, sblive value, dlink nic, adaptec scsi card (2940) with scsi cd and cdrw, enermax 350W PS, hdd's as above, all in a lian li case, running win98se and win2k
 
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Lars_Coleman

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It shouldn't harm anything but your hair. What I mean by that is that I would be pulling my hair out if I had to do that every time I would change to one or the other. It could have some abnormal wear.

What I would do is use jumper select (Master/Slave) and just set up the system as dual boot so you can select what OS you want to boot first.

<font color=red>BIOS updates do wonders ....</font color=red>
 
G

Guest

Guest
Actually, I do not need to change the cables. I have my maxtor on the "master" end of the cable, and the quantum on the "slave" connector. However, both hdd's are jumpered to cable select. All I need to do is select in bios which drive I want to boot from. The maxtor has win98se, the quantum has win2k.

I really don't use win2k a lot, it is just that win98 is dying out, and I am not sure yet about winxp, so I am trying to become familiar with win2k.

My question really is: Is there a danger of harming the hdd's because of the cable select jumpering, as opposed to the more normal master/slave??? My friend simply raised this question, but did not know the answer, so I am searching for one.

I could set up a dual boot, but I just spent a year finally getting my a7v with win98se to be "free" of bugs (had to set 4in1 agp driver to "normal", but my comp is stable). I do not have confidence in a stable dual boot config.

Thanks.
 
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Toejam31

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Your inexperience is showing, my friend. There is nothing inherently unstable about a system that uses a boot-loader during startup to select an operating system. I can understand your trepidation, after spending that much time troubleshooting the computer, but your worry is pointless. The only difference when using the bootloader, instead of making the change in the BIOS, is that you won't have to spend so much time switching between the two drives. The configuration of the two operating systems will be exactly the same, in all respects, except for the addition of the boot files. And if you ever decide to remove one of the operating system, editing the boot.ini file is very easily done, either from the GUI in Win2K, or with WordPad in Win98.

<A HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/community/stories/main/0,9057,2662085,00.html" target="_new">http://www.zdnet.com/community/stories/main/0,9057,2662085,00.html</A>

Of course, it's your choice ... and as far as I know, there is nothing damaging about your preference. Jumpering a drive as Cable Select won't harm the hard drive. It's just a jumper setting ... you aren't doing anything outrageous. If you like what you are doing, and the hard drives are properly identified in both OS's ... I don't see a problem. Only one partition can be active in an OS, in any case.

Note: Dual-booting functions best when both of these operating systems are FAT32. This is because a NTFS partition cannot be "seen" from FAT32.

My 57 cents ...

Toejam31

<font color=red>My Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847</A>
____________________________________________________

<font color=blue>"Does history record any case in which the majority was right?" ... Robert A. Heinlein</font color=blue>
 
G

Guest

Guest
Great, thanks.

You're right, there is nothing "necessarily" unstable about a dual boot, I didn't mean to imply that. It's just that given my troubleshooting history, it was not the way I wanted to go. I wanted to keep the 2 os's in isolation, so if one crapped out and i had to reformat the drive, i still had the other on the other drive, just in case I didn't feel like installing the crapped out one immediately.

Once I have regained confidence in my system, I may try it for the convenience of a dual boot, but until then, the cable select method offers for me the best flexibility.

I appreciate your insight though. Thanks.
 
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mbetea

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toe-
got a question, maybe you got a link or something in that library of yours :tongue: i thought there was a utility or "hot-fix" to be able to format disks/partitions larger than 32gb using fat32?

well if luck is a lady, it explains why i have no luck :frown:
 
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Toejam31

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Yep. There's an update for FDISK. But the limitation used to be 64GB, instead of 32GB.

<A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q263/0/44.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=32 GB&rnk=5&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=W95" target="_new">http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q263/0/44.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=32 GB&rnk=5&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=W95</A>

I hope this is what you were looking for ...

You could also use a utility like Partition Magic.

See ya ...

Toejam31

<font color=red>My Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847</A>
____________________________________________________

<font color=blue>"Does history record any case in which the majority was right?" ... Robert A. Heinlein</font color=blue>
 
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Lars_Coleman

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Maybe he's speaking the limitation of Windows 2000 only being able to format a 32GB or smaller partition?

I don't know of any hotfix for that because it's by design.

<font color=red>BIOS updates do wonders ....</font color=red>
 
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Toejam31

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I haven't heard of any fix for that problem, either. As far as I know, the partitions limits are as follows:

FAT - 4GB
FAT32 - 32GB
NTFS - 16 Exabytes.

The only workaround for FAT32 is to format the partition from DOS, instead of using Win2K. Or use a third-party utility.

Toejam31

<font color=red>My Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847</A>
____________________________________________________

<font color=blue>"Does history record any case in which the majority was right?" ... Robert A. Heinlein</font color=blue>
 
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mbetea

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ya, was referring to win2000, sorry, my mistake for not mentioning it. i've just been reading a lot lately about how in most regards fat32 is better than ntfs, well faster. because of the less amount of data protection, encryption, etc that fat32 has. but i haven't seen any solid benchmarks yet for this.

well if luck is a lady, it explains why i have no luck :frown:
 
T

Toejam31

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Here's a couple of articles on the subject:

<A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q100/1/08.ASP" target="_new">http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q100/1/08.ASP</A>

<A HREF="http://web.ukonline.co.uk/cook/Cluster.htm" target="_new">http://web.ukonline.co.uk/cook/Cluster.htm</A>

A few, limited benchmarks:

<A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/articles/9807/980721win98.html" target="_new">http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/articles/9807/980721win98.html</A>

<A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl?/articles/200001/20000111ST317221A.html" target="_new">http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl?/articles/200001/20000111ST317221A.html</A>

Toejam31

<font color=red>My Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847</A>
____________________________________________________

<font color=blue>"Does history record any case in which the majority was right?" ... Robert A. Heinlein</font color=blue>
 
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