BakedPotato

My computer has a SATA Hitachi hard drive with 500 gigabytes (more accurately, 465 GB). Feel free to ignore this passage, I just feel like gloating With the confusing information on installing slave drives online, I simply "winged it" and with my new Western Digital 1 TB hard drive, simply connected a new SATA link from the thing to a free slot on the motherboard thing. I didn't have a metal case to insert it beneath or above the pre-existing drive, so I simply drilled it into a slot apparently designed for a floppy drive. It's sort of hanging precariously a centimeter above the slot's floor, but it's safe. Then I waited a few days for a power splitter to connect the two, and then loaded the BIOS screen. Apparently I didn't need to do anything, as the drive was loaded and slaved. I "partitioned" and formatted it and now it is recognized on my computer.


I have no experience with how a slave drive works, but when I installed and formatted it, it was quite literally empty, save for a portion of it (less than 100 MB out of 931 GB) taken out for whatever reason by Windows (perhaps the System Restore).

My question, then, is: How exactly will it work in concert with my C: drive? I can see that it wouldn't really need to have an OS installed on it separately, but what about things like the System32 folder and the registry keys? Would my X: drive, named "BadAssMutha" need a whole new registry and/or System32 folder if I were to install programs on it?

I might know the solution already, as I moved a game folder into the new harddrive, and was able to load it as normal, but I just want confirmation.


As well, would it be safe to move my music and video files, heavily ranging in at least 100 GB of space, to the new drive? Would a power or system failure cause some kind of disconnect between the two drives that would require professional assistance or a manual reconfiguring?

raptor_pa

Basically all it is is storage. the registry and System 32 belong to the OS not the individual drives. You simply install/ save stuff to the "X:\ whatever folder name you use" for installed programs windows will automatically add the registry entries in the open registry hives, and any dlls or parts of the app that need to be loaded to System32 or other locations will be placed in the proper folder of the C drive by the installer for the app. You will probably want to use "Save as" more now so you can save documents and files to the correct location rather than windows default locations. If the game loaded as normal then you got lucky. Most apps will NOT allow you to simply copy a folder to another drive and still function correctly since this can break paths to needed files. Moving data files like videos and music will be safe, however if you have an Itunes or WMP library you might also need to change the path to the library. There really is no connection to the two drives that would be broken per se, however power or system failures could always corrrupt any drive, whether it is a single drive or multiple drive systems.