Adding a slave drive

[ZOMBIE00600]

Well, my original plan was to hook up a raid array, with two hard drives recognized as one. That is more complicated than I thought it would be, plus they have to be identical, which they are not. My new plan is to hook up the second drive as a slave. Can anyone give me a few pointers on how this is done? It would be greatly appreciated! First, where does the plug go for slave or master? Second, how can I clear the entire 2nd drive and just put windows on it? I am determined to do this myself!

[patio]

The master drive which is the one in the machine already should have the jumper set to master w/slave present and be hooked to the end of the IDE cable.
Your second HDD should be jumpered to slave and hooked to the middle connector on the same IDE cable.

I'm not sure why you want to install an OS on the slave drive though...

patio.  

[pcwizard]

You can have 2 unindentical drives setup in an array but the system will only consider both drives to be of similar size as the smallest one.

Also XP does not support mirroring, only simple, spanned and striped. None of which are as secure or as fault tolerant as mirrored.

You can buy hardware and software capable raid array but you'll be paying high for it! You could always get Server 2003 or similar, this is capable of all RAID categories. 0,1,2,3,4,5 and 10 etc.

[Gustaaf]

Keep in mind, if you have two disimailr sized drives from two different manufacturers, then I recommend setting them both as master devices on their own flat cables.
Set all other DVd/CD burning equipment as slaves.

benefits are:
1) Perfomance boost for disk running the OS.
2) CD/DVD burning and reading can take palce without burn failures. IE. Burn on the fly instead of Images.. (I like images)