I have two hard drives mounted in my case and I am trying to create an image of my smaller drive to copy to my larger hard drive and make the latter my system and boot drive. After imaging and copying, I have to arrange the jumpers on the large drive for it to be the master and the former master the slave. I have another jumper setting called "cable select". What does that jumper setting do? Both drives are connected to the computer with the same IDE cable. The cable has three connectors, one for the mobo, and two for the hard drives. Does the order in which HD connectors are connected make a difference, ie, the end connector has to be connected to the master HD, etc? After imaging, copying and resetting the HD jumpers, what has to be done to the BIOS settings in terms what drive is looked at first to boot or will the system reconcile it because of the jumper settings? Thanks DGD

if both hard drives are set to cable select the system will consider the one in the middle of the cable to be the slave and the one on the end is the master. The bios will probably set the master as the boot drive but go into bios and select ide0 or ide1 as the boot drive as needed, if it does not make the master the boot drive automatically. There are many different styles of older ide cables and some do not use cable select and some use the middle connector as the master. But most likely, the first paragraph applies

You would be better off to use both IDE channels to do that. IDE 0 and IDE 1 are two different channels. Each channel is capable of supporting two drives. A master and Slave. I would suggest that you configure each drive as Master (alone if that setting is available) and connect to both IDE 0 and IDE 1. IDE 0 being the drive that you boot from now and IDE 1 the drive that you want to image to. Forget about CDrom drives for the moment. After iimaging is complete the drive on IDE 1 should be connected to IDE 0 as master. The rest of the drive setup depend on what other drives you have.

I have a CD-RW drive and a CD-ROM drive on the second IDE channel. I really only use the CD-RW drive and will replace it with a DVD RW drive in due course. Thanks DGD

If you want to keep the old drive in the system for file storage, set it up as the slave on IDE 0. Set the burner as the Master on IDE 1.

With your older machine I think the master on ide0 will be made bootdrive automatically. I'd ignore cable select as that may cause problems for your. Set the original drive at ide0 to master with the connector on the end and the other one as slave connected to the middle. Do the image to the slave drive and change jumpers and cable connectors. With old DMA33 cables it's not so important but with the new 80pin cable for DMA66/100/133 the master should be connected to the end and the slave at the middle. BTW: You can't do an image of a windows partition out of that running windows because some of the system files are protected and can't be copied. I use Partition Magic for that and it boots into a special mode to copy such partitions. You will need something similiar!

Free Weasel I thought DGD was installing a new drive to gain space. I just bought a WD 80GB at OfficeMax. The drive came with a utility to transfer everything to the new drive. I thought that is what DGD was attempting to do. I probably should have asked. If that is not what he is trying to do then I agree with you.