How to swap hard drive wires?

[par0x]

Hey i wanna swap my C drive to the E drive (not letters) so i can install xp on the E drive anyone know a pictured tutorial ??

[TheFiresInTheSky]

that all depends, are they the same HD's?

if so, id think that you could just switch the wires on them.

 

EDIT: apparently, you dont even have to touch them according to http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t226...ers-win-xp.html

just look in the BIOS and switch the master and the slave.

-aaron

[JohnDemolition]

...do you even know what you're saying? there's no way to change which HD is the slave and which is the master in the BIOS. you can only change which HD(or CD of Floppy) boots up first. the only way to change which drive is the slave/master is to change the placement of the cables.

 

as for how to change them from master to slave and vice versa, just take a look at the long cable which is connected to the HDs and switch around the HDs that it goes into. that's what i did and it worked like a charm.

[par0x]

ok thankyou. will windows still boot cos its not on the E drive..

[Eldmannen]

ok thankyou. will windows still boot cos its not on the E drive..

 

When a computer start, it looks at the boot up order defined in the BIOS which is usually something like this "Floppy, Harddisk, CD-ROM", but it can be in any other.

If floppy is first, then it tries to boot from the floppy, if it cant find any diskette in the drive, it goes to the next, and tries to boot from that, which usually is the Harddisk i think, then it tries to read the MBR (Master Boot Record) or the bootsector. There it will check if there is any bootloader present (usually that is NTLDR but there are others like LILO and GRUB, etc). Then the bootloader either boots the operating system or if you have more than one operating system it might ask which operating system to boot if it is a so called "multi-bootloader".

 

Wikipedia has an article about booting.

[res45]

...do you even know what you're saying? there's no way to change which HD is the slave and which is the master in the BIOS. you can only change which HD(or CD of Floppy) boots up first. the only way to change which drive is the slave/master is to change the placement of the cables.

 

as for how to change them from master to slave and vice versa, just take a look at the long cable which is connected to the HDs and switch around the HDs that it goes into. that's what i did and it worked like a charm.

 

 

Don't forget to change the jumper positions on the back of the HD's also. That is if your drives doest support the cable select feature.