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Hard drives


longgone

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Here's the question, can I have both SATA and EIDE drives in the same machine. The mail machine has a SATA mainboard and my older machine (which is going to retire) has EIDE mainboard. I have to fairly new 500GB drives in the older machine, I also have a pair of adapters that will adapt the EIDE connection to a SATA connection. I have been told on here that I can have 10 partitions on a SATA drive and 4 on an EIDE drive (primary drives). By using this adapter from EIDE to SATA .. is that going to change the number of partitions I can put on the EIDE drive?TIA .. all

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V.T. Eric Layton

Yup. You can run both. I have EIDE and SATA drives on my system, but my motherboard has the legacy EIDE channels (0,1) on it. When you use one of those adapters to run EIDE on SATA channels, you limit the older EIDE drive to the SATA partition limit of 15 partitions. I don't think this applies in MS Windows, though. We were just discussing this around here the other day somewhere...Ah... http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.ph...st&p=279902I would use whatever that adapter is telling you as gospel, Dale.

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Is that limit of 15 partitions a total of primary, logical, extended or is it some other combination.
Dale,Since you're running a combination of Windows OS/Linux, I can only give you a definitive answer as far as Windows is concerned. There is really no limitation to the number of partitions you can have on a SATA or IDE hard drive other than the number of letters in the alphabet (A-Z). If you wish to use more than 26 partitions for some reason, you can mount those as virtual drives in Windows but you need a windows server OS in order to do so. It may be possible to do so with a windows desktop OS (such as Win 7) but I am not aware of any such method.As far as partitioning structure is concerned, you can quickly look those up on the internet. But in a nutshell, you can have a maximum of 4 primary partitions on a hard drive (SATA or IDE) or 3 primary plus 1 extended partition containing several logical partitions. With creating those logical partitions, you are once again limited to the number of letters in the alphabet so if you have 3 primary, that leaves you with 23.Once again, my answer may be incorrect or not applicable to people running a combination of Windows/Linux OS such as yourself.
I have been told on here that I can have 10 partitions on a SATA drive and 4 on an EIDE drive (primary drives). By using this adapter from EIDE to SATA .. is that going to change the number of partitions I can put on the EIDE drive?TIA .. all
That is incorrect. You can connect upto 2 devices per IDE/EIDE channel - a master & slave device. Each of them can contain have several partitions as I explained above. If your motherboard has 2 IDE/EIDE channel, that means you could have 4 hard drives in the system. Actually even that is not totally accurate since you could easily buy an PCI EIDE adapter to host even more hard drives. But to make this illustration simple, let's say you have 2 IDE channels on your motherboard with 4 hard drives. As long as the total number of partitions (combination of primary, extended, logical) from all 4 hard drives does not exceed 26, you'll be fine. If you want to use more than 26, you're gonna have to come up with some creative spelling or additions to the English alphabet system.As far as SATA is concerned, there is no limitation as to the number of SATA hard drives you can have other than the number of SATA ports on your motherboard. Most mainstream motherboards today (meaning consumer desktop PC oriented) host anywhere between 4-6 internal SATA ports. There is no such thing as master/slave settings on SATA. It's 1 device per port. Edited by Tushman
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Okay, that answers all those questions about the drives. I could never keep up with 26 separate partitions. At times I have problems with just 6 ...

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Dale,Since you're running a combination of Windows OS/Linux, I can only give you a definitive answer as far as Windows is concerned. There is really no limitation to the number of partitions you can have on a SATA or IDE hard drive other than the number of letters in the alphabet (A-Z). If you wish to use more than 26 partitions for some reason, you can mount those as virtual drives in Windows but you need a windows server OS in order to do so. It may be possible to do so with a windows desktop OS (such as Win 7) but I am not aware of any such method.
Any Windows OS that uses the NTFS file system supports more than 24 partitions on a single disk drive. When you run out of drive letters you can use what is technically called reparse points (heck you can use reparse points instead of drive letters if you like.) In the Disk Management tool of the Administration Control Panel you can assign either a drive letter or an empty directory/folder to a partition. This is analogous to mounting partitions to mount points in Linux.
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Any Windows OS that uses the NTFS file system supports more than 24 partitions on a single disk drive. When you run out of drive letters you can use what is technically called reparse points (heck you can use reparse points instead of drive letters if you like.) In the Disk Management tool of the Administration Control Panel you can assign either a drive letter or an empty directory/folder to a partition. This is analogous to mounting partitions to mount points in Linux.
I didn't think you could use XP to setup reparse points. Is it available in XP home or only certain editions of XP like Pro.
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I didn't think you could use XP to setup reparse points. Is it available in XP home or only certain editions of XP like Pro.
Yes, you can definitely do it in XP Pro. I've never had Home and when I've handled people's computers with Home I wouldn't have thought to check it out. ;)
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  • 3 years later...

While this thread is about hard drives . Q ? . Having just taken the Dell Inspiron apart to see if I could resolve a screen problem . Without any luck I may add .

I am wondering if I can install the little hard drive as a companion to the one already in the Fujitsu Siemens .

I would hate to take the Fuji apart for no reason and maybe bloop my favorite slack top

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V.T. Eric Layton

All you would need, Cap'n, is a physical slot to mount the hard drive inside the unit and a SATA or EIDE slot open on the motherboard to plug the drive into. There's no reason it shouldn't work.

 

Boy. You revived an old thread here.

Edited by V.T. Eric Layton
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These machines are lappy's .I don't see any jumpers on the little drives to designate master/slave . Still havn't opened the Fugi yet . Guess a little paranoia hanging me up ..

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V.T. Eric Layton

Ah, yes... "Inspiron." I should have caught that, as I have one myself. ;)

 

Nope. You can't add additional drives. You can upgrade to a larger one, though... and more RAM, too. :yes:

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