Hi
I bought a new ide 80gig hard drive this one will be Master with XP Pro.
what I was wondering is if I put the jumper to slave on my other 40gig drive
and seeing that I can switch drives at the start up by using a shortcut key F8 that came with my
Asus P4 800-vm motherboard if this could eventually damage the second drive.
The reason I ask is that I did use an older drive this way an eventually damaged the SMART
so dont really know if its just the drive or using the bios shortcut in selecting drives that cause the SMART lost
Both have the same full install of XP Pro

Thanks

(Moderator edit: moved post to more appropriate forum. jgweed)

SMART is the acronym for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology that has become a industry standard which check the systems vitals and usually if enabled in the BIOS will give you a warning that your hdd is in trouble. I suspect that your hdd was already in trouble and that the SMART was just telling you. The failure you experienced would not have been from that type of use.

Thanks
But that is the reason Im changing drives, but did wonder if at boot switching to secondary
drive this way may have accelerated the problem
But still wondering by putting my primary as slave seeing the new drive will be master and do have
stuff to transfer if by leaving the secondary in slave with XP installed without a format could cause
a problem in long term

Have a nice day
Cobra2

The boot sequence won't harm the drive - any more than any access will harm it. If the drive's on it's last legs (the SMART will indicate that) - then it's gonna die soon, so backup your data.

Installing the new hard drive as the Master and putting the OS on there won't be a problem. The biggest problem will be to get Windows to boot off the new (and presumably faster drive). To do this, remove the other (older) drive when installing Windows on the new drive.

FWIW - you may have problems if you install the same Windows on the new drive that is on the old drive (but not likely if no other components change). BUT, if you try to use both copies simultaneously, you may get into hot water with Microsoft - and may be denied updates because this is a violation of the EULA.