Re: Moving a hard drive w/ a Gateway-installed OEM WindowsXPto a new mobo

What Scott said was dead-on.

I'll simply add that, for the two-drive scenario, some budget
motherboards come with a single 80-pin cable that's color-keyed to one
of the two on-board IDE plugs.  If that's the case with the mobo you're
moving to then go ahead and use that one for both HDs.

Even if you do a fair bit of disk-to-disk copying you probably won't
notice that much difference in performance.

One point that I didn't really make yesterday was that optical drives
usually talk at a lower DMA Mode than the average hard drive.  You said
your drive was mode 5.  I wouldn't be surprised if the DVD drive was
mode 3 (IIRC the old 33MB/s spec).  They can work on the same cable just
fine but folks always seem to get the best results using separate
cables.  Maybe the IDE controller drops to the least common denominator;
I'm not sure.

BTW, with dual-HDs you can tweak performance a bit.  Set up Windows with
2 swap files, one on each drive (My Computer Properties - Advanced -
Performance - Advanced - Virtual Memory).  Also, consider segregating
the OS + apps to one drive and data to another.  Or OS + data on one and
apps on the other.  Move the browser cache and other temp areas to the
secondary drive.  The concept is to spread the IO across both drives as
in a normal Windows desktop environment the C: drive takes the vast
majority of the work.

And if space permits, institute a batch file to copy important data from
the normal data drive to a backup folder on the other drive.  While it
doesn't protect against theft, fire, etc. it does guard against a drive
failure.