Confused: Can you swap 2 hard drives over primary(Master)-slave mode?

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Batman

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#39912 21-Aug-2009 11:46

Hi - my Dell came with a noisy 320GB hard drive which obviously became the primary HDD. Then i added a WD 640GB drive which obviously became slave.
320GB has 3 partitions, 640GB also has 3 partitions.

My Vista OS is in partition 1 in the 320GB. I would love to have a new beginning with windows 7 by installing it into partition 1 of the 640GB HD and also making the 640GB HD the primary active boot drive. question is, how and is it actually possible. I dont care if vista doesnt boot anymore, as long as i can make the 640Gb drive the main active boot drive to boot windows 7 and making the 320GB the slave drive.

Now i'm wondering if i swap the sata connections on the 2 drives, will the 640 become primary and 320 become slave? Is it much more complicated than just swapping the sata jacks? will the drives become corrupt?

Just to get an idea - planning ahead for October 22.
Thanks.

mysticnz

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#249417 21-Aug-2009 13:23

Hey i cant remember if SATA drives have jumpers or not?? but if they do u will have to move the jumper into the position of "Primary" on your drive and move the jumper from the old 320gig to "Slave" (usually just removing the jumper puts it into slave). If not then yes just moving the SATA cables from port 2 to port 1 will turn your 640gig drive into your primary drive (i think soz if im wrong).

Do some trial and error

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Batman

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#249498 21-Aug-2009 17:26

would love to 'trial and error' BUT if error results in irreversible drive corruption that's gonna be a disaster so i'd ask people first!

Overclocker01

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#249823 23-Aug-2009 15:10

Sata drives dont have jumpers (afaik, both my seagate and WD dont have them) It should just be a case Connecting the 640 HDD to the SATA1 connecter on MOBO then select the 640 HDD as your first boot media in boot device settings in bios

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#249827 23-Aug-2009 15:51

hmm, thanks! hope it IS as easy as that ... and that if it doesnt work that i can just reconnect the jumpers as before and everything will be status quo.

what i'm afraid of is that both hard drives will then have boot sector/master boot record and both become 'active drives/partitions' and the mobo gets confused and may not be able to boot like before ... okay fingers crossed come october

just wondering if anyone's done it before with no problems switching back and forth

Ragnor

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#249829 23-Aug-2009 15:58

The concept of master and slave is mostly outdated now. There are x SATA channels on the motherboard and 1 drive per channel.

Before you do anything you should either backup your data or make disk images of both disks, you should do this regularly anyway not just when you're about to change something.

Then what I think you should do is move the 640 to SATA1 but leave the 320 unplugged, install windows so the install uses the 640 for the MBR and what not. Later plug the 320 back in.