Hard-drive shuffle tough to master

By Andy Walker

Question: I want to switch my hard drives around and change the corresponding drive letters.

I have a Pentium 133 mHz machine with a 545 meg Seagate drive and a CD-ROM. I recently added another 2.5 gigabyte IDE Samsung hard drive.

I kept the old drive as drive C, the master drive. The new drive is the secondary master and is partitioned into D and E drives. My CD-ROM is the secondary slave and became F drive.

I now want to use the new drive as the master drive. I’d like to change the drive letters and have my new drive partitioned as C and D. The old drive would become E.

If I don’t change the size of the partitions, can I use FDisk to change one partition to read as primary partition without losing all the information on my new drive? I am trying to avoid backing up the old C drive as it will take forever and a day with 3.5-inch floppy disks.

One store clerk suggested I exchange the ribbon connectors on the hard drives, but it didn’t work. Any help you can give me will be appreciated. — F.S.

Answer: I read this note and felt the same way one does when you step in the catbox in the dark: annoyed at myself for being disoriented.

I didn’t have a clue. Though if you read another of my columns, you would know that my dad and I recently butchered the inside of his Aptiva when we added a second drive. So I’m supposed to have half a clue.

An e-mail later from adviser David Peterson, VP of Edmonton-based Concept International, Inc., provided some clarity.

"The store clerk should stick to clerking," he began, in what turned into a flurry of e-mail back and forth until I got it straight.

So first, some necessary background for us cat-litter steppers, then the answer.

A PC requires one hard disk to be in charge. It’s the boss hard drive, if you will, because it contains the operating system.

"In theory," explained Peterson, "the primary master drive is master to all other devices. It is the boot device."

If you install a second hard drive, it needs to be configured as a slave drive or secondary master. A secondary drive isn’t bootable, it simply holds data and does what it’s told to do by the master drive.

Some motherboards support two IDE channels. It means they can support up to four drives, including a CD-ROM drive.

A motherboard, as you know, is the large circuit board that connects all a computer’s components together. It’s the roads, fields, and fences in CPUville.

Ribbons connect from two IDE sockets on the motherboard to the drives. Each ribbon has two connectors for two drives.

On a two-channel IDE motherboard, there will always be connectivity for a primary master drive and a primary slave drive on one ribbon. A secondary master drive and a secondary slave drive go on the other ribbon.

"In reality, though," continued Peterson, "the drives must be set up (or jumpered) so that one drive is a master on each IDE channel. Normally, on a new machine, the hard drive will be the primary master, the CD-ROM will be the primary slave, and the secondary channel will remain unused."

The master or slave settings are set by moving tiny connector switches (or jumpers) on the side or back of the hard drive.

So the question at hand is how to swap everything around so that the new drive with two partitions (virtual drives D and E) becomes the primary master.

First, the new drive must meet the following conditions so it can be used as the boot drive:

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