Please guide me - confused with SATA PATA Primary Secondary master Slave...!!!

[sunandoghosh]

Please guide me - confused with SATA PATA Primary Secondary master Slave...!!!

Respected members and gurus,

I am a non technical person and am only good at using computers for my finance jobs and NOT configuring it.

From last three days I have been reading and reading and reading about SATA PATA Primary Secondary master slave and so on...but now i think i really need help as my head is spinning...

WHAT I HAVE:

# Intel Motherboard 865GBF
# Two Hard disks

Disk One is PATA of 80 GB having windows 2000 advanced server loaded by my company (beyond my abiility to load it) for me with me being as administrator. However there is no other computer connected to it.

Disk two is SATA of 80 GB having two partitions C and D both partitions having windows xp professional
operating system and 40 Gb each.

Now on Disk Two i Used to work in Partition C with data saved on D. But one fine day without my knowledge the C OS crashed and so i started working on D. It has all the data.

Lots of valuable data is there in SATA hard disk two above in partition D.

WHAT I AM PLANNING:

# I have purchased one PATA Hard Disk of 80 GB to back up my valuable data on Partition D of disk one as I am feeling scared what shall happen if the partition D also crashes like partition C on second SATA hard disk.

In addition I am planning to purchase one either PATA or SATA (please say which one should i purchase...???) for backing up data which is there on PATA DISK One.

WHY I AM SO CONFUSED:

I am lost between PATA SATA primary secondary master slave as its truly beyond my technical capability to
understand. I have been surfing net and reading online materials for hours from last three days without any conclusion.

WHAT HELP I NEED:

Please guide me as to how should the hard disks(all from seagte):

Hard Disk One PATA windows advanced server 2000 80 Gb
Hard Disk Two SATA windows XP professional edition
Hard Disk Three PATA (blank brand new)
Hard Disk Four SATA or PATA (decided by you people to be purchased soon)

be installed on my Intel 865 GBF motherboard so that all primary secondary master slave (i am lost in these terms) configurations are properly done.

What should be my ideal back up strategy and how should i go about it.

I know that there are many many knowledgeable and experienced members in this forum who have great ideas and knowledge to effectively deal with the above issue. Please be kind enough to elaborate on what u think should be my approach for

a. installation on motherboard
b. backing up
c. disk management strategy

which is optimised for best performance under my situation.

ALSO can i have all the three Hard Disks connected simultaneously to my system....????

Also can i access data of one disk while being booted into another hard disk.....????

Thank u for ur anticipated help and valuable advices.

regards

sunando

sunandoghosh (at) rediffmail (dot) com

p.s. Please elaborate ur suggestion so that i can understand it with reasons if u deem fit for better
understanding...

ALSO suggest please the best simple back up strategy.

You need to please speciafy a detailed simple step by step installation, partitioning, formatting and back up strategy for me. thank u so so much.

also if u want to add anything please add...

[sunandoghosh]

well its so so surprising that no one even considered replying...

i am shocked or may be my expectation from dani web was a bit high....

[chrisbliss18]

sunando, the problem is that you have asked way too many questions at once. You just post a bunch of information and then expect that we are going to interpret all your actual questions and answer them.

For example, I see the following topics in your post:

• Information about how to hook up and configure multiple drives of both PATA types and SATA types to a specific motherboard.
• How to configure the BIOS to properly handle drives of different types.
• How to handle multibooting operating systems from different drives.
• The definitions and differences between primary, secondary, master, and slave.
• How operating systems are able to share drive data from other OS's partitions and how to configure them to do so.
• Smart strategies on how to add additional storage and how to select the format that the drive should be in.
• Backup strategies and how to implement them.
• Handling partitions that have crashed OSes on them.
• Reparing broken partitions and preventing OS crashes.

On top of all of this, you request that the responder creates a simple, step-by-step guide just for you so that you aren't confused. You also request additional information that the responder may feel is related to the subjects.

I often respond to single-subject questions with multiple paragraphs of data that can take up to anywhere from fifteen minutes to many hours to think about, research, and post so that I ensure that I have given the person quality information that I have ensured will work and that is presented in a fashion that is simple to understand. If I were to answer all your questions in the manner you wish to have the response in, I would be spending a full day reading technical references, researching hardware information, and creating a formatted technical how-to document.

I don't believe that is true that you expected too much from DaniWeb, there are great people here with a willingness to share their valuable resources for nothing in return. I do believe that you expected too much from a response. Any response to your questions would either not satisfy all the questions that you have or would be inaccurate and oversimplified.

My suggestion to you is to post a reply that picks a single topic as a starting point. I'd think that you would first like to learn how to manage PATA and SATA drives on a system and how you tell the BIOS to use a PATA drive as the boot drive before the SATA drive or vice-versa. Then go on to ask about master, slave, primary, and secondary definitions. From this base, we can start building, but it will still take a long time to answer all your questions.