Second hard drive

Hello, I'm going to be installing a second hard drive for my niece in a few days. It will be an ATA. I'm going to be leaving the old one in for secondary storage. I would like to designate the new one as Master and the old one as slave. I would like it to boot off the new drive with a fresh copy of XP. Can I do this? After physically installing the drive and adjusting the jumper settings, do I need to enter CMOS upon boot up to make sure the drive is detected? Then, is it simply a matter of adjusting the boot sequence to boot from CD-ROM to load new windows XP, and then readjusting boot sequence to boot off of new drive(will this be HDD0?) from then on? Will the new drive, designated as Master, be listed as HDD0 or HDD1? I'm assuming it will be HDD0, is this correct? I can run two separate operating systems on two separate drives can't I? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you, mike

You can if you would like; Yes; Windows will take care of that; No, if you hook the drives up correctly, it will be HDD1; and finally… yes. Sorry.. a bit of humor there. hehe.. Anyway, you got the basics there correct. You need to remember that when adding a new drive NOT to put two (2) cd drives on one IDE. The reason for this is because you will not be able to "burn on the fly". Basically, your BUS holds the cached info (Buffer) when burning/copying a cd and one (1) BUS cannot store all the info. So, if you have 2 cd drives, then set them both as slaves and put them IN THE MIDDLE of the ribbon cable. Set both HDD's as masters and put them ON THE END of cable. Now, boot into BIOS and make sure that the boot order shows to boot from CD Drive before HDD. Put your Windows installation CD in and boot. When it asks "Press Any Key To Boot From CD"… do so. Navigate your way to install a fresh copy of Windows. After the EULA. It should then take you to the partitioning and formatting part of install. There you will see all your physical HDD's that are recognized. Simply highlight the drive of choice (in this case.. your second or newly installed drive)… if the drive is larger than 20gb then format it as NTFS (you can use Fat, however, uncompressed file system will result in much better performance). Then simply follow the instructions. Once the installation is complete, you can reboot if you want to and you will boot to windows boot menu. Showing all bootable OS's and simply choose which install you want to boot to.

Thanks. I appreciate it. I've done a few hard drives before, but I've never added a second one. It's also been a couple years since I've done one. Just wanted to make sure I didn't botch things. Hopefully, it will work out okay. Thanks again, Mike