Switching HDD from slave to master...

misman1982

I recently reached the limit on my master HD and cannot load any more music on my iTunes. I have a slave HD that has plenty of room to store stuff. Can I switch the slave HD to the master HD without formatting? Why is storage being taken up in the master first? I save all files in the slave HD but I don't see a big change in the amount of space taken up after I save anything to that drive. What can I do?

Ricka182

You don't have to switch anything. If the drive is filling up, that's where the stuff is being saved. You could try doing a disk cleanup to get rid of junk files, also do a virii/malware scan.

Sie

You may have problems having your OS installed on the slave drive rather than the master....

Just copy some stuff over, write it to CD, do disk clean up as advised above. No need to swap them just move some stuff.

TeKniques

Just convert your Disk 1 and Disk 2 to Dynamic Disks and do a Spanned volume.

I'm assuming you have Windows XP Installed.

misman1982

I don't understand why my master drive is losing disk space when I'm doing a majority of saving files to the slave. I'm also having a problem from the Picasa photo mgt program. A window has been coming up lately when I open the program saying that I'm running low on disk space even though I am saving all my pictures in the slave which has more than 100GB space left.

Ricka182

Have you ever done a disk defrag?

Danman32

Being master or slave is a hardware issue, not a logical issue. To the OS, they are separate physical drives, unless your bios is treating them as a mirror, which would be presented to the OS as one physical drive.

Stay away from dynamic disks. It is a pain to work with, and nearly impossible to recover if issues occur. It is also not possible practically to reverse and go back to basic disks, especially if the system and/or boot partition is on the disk to be converted back to basic disk. With dynamic disks, you would only be able to use them on Windows 2000, 2003 or XP.

Check to see if the OS does see both drives and how they are allocated. You can do this easily using Disk Manager which can be accessed by right clicking on My Computer and selecting Manage on the context menu.

Assuming that you find both disks do show up as separate logical disks with separate drive letters (one partition/drive letter per physical disk), you could move your swap file (page file) to your second drive or change the pagefile configuration.

Now that I wrote that last paragraph, I have a feeling your master drive has at least 2 partitions, thus at least 2 drive letters, thus making you think drive is on the slave physical drive, when in reality it is on the master drive. That shouldn't affect drive C: though.

You may want to check the placement of your profile and My Documents. Though it is complex to move your profile on a standalone system, moving My Documents is easy. If you are saving your music to My Music, by default that resides within your My Documents, which by default resides in your profile, which by default resides in your boot partition under the folder Documents and Settings, which is most likely your master drive.

Lee H

here is another trick, if you have the cd to every program installed to your c drive then uninstall and install it again setting the install path to d;\program files instead of c;\program files.

also how old is your os install, i find that every 4-6 months or so i re-install xp again and that seems to flatten out any minor problem slowing my pc down as eventually they slow down anyway so its just a matter of time before you have to do a reinstall, hope that helps

lee h