Hello. I'm not a newbie to computers but I really suck at hardware issues. I have a 160 gig harddrive and its nearly full, i just ordered another 160 gig harddrive, same model. I want to partition them and hook them up so they share the space. My questions are what do i do in the bios? Can i do this without erasing any data on the full harddrive? Will the speed be similar to having a 300 gig drive if i partition it correctly? or will it be slow being two 160 drives.. They are two western digital 1600jb EIDE drive 160 gig thx in advance

First of all you need to verify the original disk is properly recognized by model and full capacity in the POST screens at start up. If the POST screens DO show the full 160GB then you can proceed. Your motherboard has two IDE controllers on it. You may or may not be using both. What other drives are currently present? While you answer that question I will state the what you request is called a dynamic disk. You would need to partition and format the new drive from within Disk Management is WinXP. That would then allow your C drive to SPAN both disks. If you are using WinXP home edition you can't create a dynamic disk. I would urge you to reconsider. There is only one good reason to use that configuration and you situation is not it. The MSKB article linked below will explain in more detail. If you have ANY issues with the primary (old) disk you will break the array and the data on the new 160GB disk will be lost. I suggest you keep it separate. Post back with your responses and further instructions can be given. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343

I have the 160 gig hard drive on secondary master and a dvd burner on secondary slave. Primary master/slave says not installed. I assume i put the new drive on primary master? If so will i be able to copy over 80 gigs of information to that drive? and keep the rest (windows and other stuff) on secondary master drive? Would that work well? Or would it be slow?

I suggest you use a second 80 wire IDE cable to connect the original 160GB as the master alone on the Primary channel. Then connect the new 160 on the Secondary channel as the master. Leaving the burner as the slave on the secondary channel. I further recommend you partition that new drive using the utility available by the drive manufacturer. What is your method of back up, if you have one at all? Your should maintain at least TWO copies of any personal data. IMO optical media provides the best back up media. Disks are cheap, easy to duplicate and are more reliable than Hard drives, especially, external hard drives. I recommend simple copying of data files like Office files, pictures, music, etc. to optical disk. DVDR or CDR are both cheap media. Then use an imaging program like Ghost or Acronis true Image to create restore images for each partition with Windows or programs on it. Those images can be stored on any media that can hold them. However, again, I feel optical is the best.

I agree with practically everything Othehill said. I use an imager for backing up my Operating System, but i use a backup program (Beyond Compare 2) for all my other files. But backing up is the important thing, not 'how' you do it. It's almost inevitable that you will eventually have something go wrong that causes loss of data.

aegis I too use Beyond Compare to sync my backup folders on a second drive. I also image all my partitions periodically and use Drag to disk almost daily to catch the odd file that may not be duplicated. Occasionally using the Drag to Disk files to sync the others. So we do it all the same. Except for Drag to Disk. I dedicate a second CDRW burner to that task.

Great minds think alike, Othehill. Or is it paranoid minds that think alike? ;-) I have to admit that I am obsessed with doing my backups, and I still lose stuff every once in a while.