2 Hard Drives - will changing MB affect the data on the 2nd drive?

[Goenitz196]

Okay I have an AMD motherboard and I am running 2 hard drives, a Maxtor 40GB (Master) and a Seagate 80GB (Slave). Now the Master 40GB is partitioned into 2 sections - C: 10GB and D: 30GB. The 10GB is used to run Windows 2000 entirely, and nothing else goes into that section unless some specific programs need to install to this section. The 30GB section is used to hold all my program files, such as the installed program files and the program setup exe files.
And finally the E: 80GB drive is used to hold all my personal stuff in there, like videos, games, photos, etc. It has nothing to do with any windows files or program files, just has MY files.

Now the thing is, I am installing a new Pentium motherboard soon, and I know I'll need to format and re-partition the 40GB drive again to set the whole thing up. What I want to know is, will I have to format the 80GB again? Will it work the same way as it did once I have the OS installed into the 40GB drive? Will there be any complications because as you know the 80GB drive was used with the old motherboard configuration? I think there shouldn't be and I don't think I need to re-format the 80GB Drive as it didn't have any Windows files or Program files in there...but I like to make sure. Any help will be most appricated.

 

[pmonett]

IDE drives are pretty much plug-and-play nowadays.
Given that the disk is formatted, I do not see any reason why your data should be affected in any way.
I have already taken hard disks from one PC to another and nothing ever happened to the data on it.
So as far as I know, your data will be safe.
By the way, good idea putting your data on a disk seperate from your OS. I do that all the time ever since I had one go bad with everything on it. Lost all my data and since then, my strict policy has been to keep both separated.
Helps when you back up the OS disk too, since I like to keep images of my system in case some crazy app knocks the registry out of line. I hate reinstalling Windows just because the test of a shareware went wrong.

 

[jdunderhill]

pmonett is spot on, I couldn't see any problems with losing any data either, the new OS will pick up your 80 GB drive and you can just access the files as you did before

 

[Goenitz196]

Thanks...what about if the OS is changed from 2000 to XP Pro? Will that cause any complications?

 

[Jontmke]

No, not at all. XP is just 2000.1 with a fancy interface. I'm only half joking, look at the OS version sometime. XP is listed as 5.1.xxxx.xxx while 2000 is 5.0.xxxx.xxx.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[paparazi]

Just as a footnote to the above (all excellent advice BTW)
Keep the same file format (NTFS or Fat32) as you are currently using.
Martin

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