New Master Hard Drive?

[Indieboi918]

Ok so i've ordered a new 1.5TB hard drive from scan to replace my current 320GB one, I want to use my new hard drive as the Master hard drive & the old one as the slave drive.
So how would I go about doing this?

Or I may just transfer everything to my new one and have just a single drive. What would be the best way of doing this?

Thanks,
Steve

[The_Wheelhouse]

AFAIK they don't make 1.5 TB IDE drives?

So you should just stick the 1.5TB Drive in the eSATA plug in you mobo

[Indieboi918]

It's been quite a while since I opened my PC case & what I though was the Hard Drive cable labeled master is actually the cable for my optical drives

And you're right it's not an IDE its a Sata II drive.
Thanks for the quick reply anyway. I'll just have to plug it in tomorrow then.

[jim]

There's no such thing as slave/master with SATA.

Just plug it in, and do whatever you want with them. It's really that simple

[KidChameleon]

If you have them both in at the same time you will quite likely need to set the BIOS to boot from the hard drive you want, otherwise it will try booting from the 320GB one.

Start with only the 1.5TB drive plugged in, install your operating system, then once it's up and running you can put the 320GB drive in and transfer your data. That way you won't accidentally install Windows (Or Linux or whatever) over all your data by choosing the wrong drive.

Also, when you install the operating system, put it on a 100-150GB partition, then set the rest of the drive to another partition. Install programs (Games, Photo editing etc) on the small partition, and keep data (photos, videos etc) on the bigger partition. Then if you need to reinstall the operating system you won't have to mess around transferring data.

[jim]

Start with only the 1.5TB drive plugged in, install your operating system, then once it's up and running you can put the 320GB drive in and transfer your data. That way you won't accidentally install Windows (Or Linux or whatever) over all your data by choosing the wrong drive

In addition to that, you may have to repair the bootloader afterwards - system could get confused with multiple boot loaders in place and use the wrong one.

With Windows 7, that's just a case of putting the disc in and selecting the repair option. With XP you need to muck around with boot.ini.

Having said that, you might want to use the 320GB to boot from, and the 1.5TB solely for data. That's what I'd do personally, but it depends how much software/games you want to install. If that will take up more than 320GB, then obviously that's no longer an option.