Niterider, since you have PC experience let me ask you: are there any cons/things I should be very careful about if I'm getting a second hard drive? Your entire preliminary post was about partitioning one hard drive, so I'm wondering if you think getting a 2nd hard drive is a bad idea... Are there any BIOS issues? Someone told me getting a second hard drive is sometimes dependent on the BIOS being up to par, whatever that means... Thanks!
Quote: Niterider, since you have PC experience let me ask you: are there any cons/things I should be very careful about if I'm getting a second hard drive? Your entire preliminary post was about partitioning one hard drive, so I'm wondering if you think getting a 2nd hard drive is a bad idea... Are there any BIOS issues? Someone told me getting a second hard drive is sometimes dependent on the BIOS being up to par, whatever that means... Thanks! ---------------------- Nope not a bad idea. I just prefer the easy switching dual boot gives me. There's valid arguements for 2 drives as you read here. You will have to use some sort of bootmanager if you plan to switch back and forth between win98 and win2k, unless you physically unhook one for the other each time. Take a look at a program called "System Commander" for booting from 2 different drives. Other ways exist to do it also but frankly I haven't looked for a way in quite a while. No matter what you do BACK UP YOUR DATA that you can't afford to lose. Never trust a hard drive to always work. All harddrives eventualy die. Its just a question of when. Far as BIOS issues: It isn't the ability to accept a 2nd drive (unless you already have 4 drives including CDRoms) but whether your bios will support the size of your new drive. If you buy a 100GIG for instance its more likely your older bios won't recognize it. With a P2-400 I can only give you my best guess since I didn't sell it to you but it will likely run up to 20GIGs - but not guaranteed. Most retail harddrives also come with boot managers that work in spite of an inferior bios but that will make bootmanager setup for 2 O/S's more complex or impossible. I never recommend using harddrive boot utilities for a variety of reasons. The biggest is if the file structure that manages the boot utility gets corrupt NONE of the drive is readable any longer. By contrast if you don't use a drive boot utility, if you simply fry your windows you could still hook up that drive slave to a booting drive and access your data files in most cases. Delt with many of these issues in the past years. Lost data is a businesses nightmare. Laboratory retrieval from a dead harddrive is VERY expensive and charged by the hour regardless of success. Hope this helped.
Happaboy, Maybe you could get one of those mobile rack that will allow you to physically remove the c:\Win98 hardrive and place in the c:\W2K hardrive. That way, you don't have to worry about incompatibility of softwares between the two as in dual boot system. Each hardrive will have it's own softwares installed and setup for each Operating System. Nite Rider was right about your older BIOS, most will not accept hardrive bigger than 20 Gigs (or 30? not sure). What you can do is get the 2nd hardrive 15 Gig, 7200rpm, W2K, installed softwares (trading, browser, ect...); and after the trading day, turn off the computer, (go for a beer), pop in the Win98 hardrive (with games, porn mpegs,ect...) However, make sure to look at the recommanded spec for W2K, I am not quite sure for W2K on a PII 400.
Hapaboy, I have used removable hard drives in my computer for the last three years. The system consists of a receiving frame in which the removable drive carrier slides into. You can set up your computer to have one receiving frame and have multiple removable hard drive carriers. One such carrier can be exclusively used for your trading applications. You can also duplicate your entire internal hard drive to the removable. In the event of an internal hard drive failure, you can swap the hard drives and be back running with little effort. With the amount of benefits offered by such a system, I really don't know why their use is not more wide spread. Here is a link that shows what the units look like: http://fp.computers.pcc.edu/pmcg/removeable_drive_bays.htm
Rogue just said the same thing I said, 'cept he has nice pics ! :eek: My friend has 3 hardrives, one for WinXP, one for Win98SE, and one for Linux, and he just swapped them back and forth... I think he just like the swapping, 'cause I am not really sure what he is using all 3 OS for... Beside, you wanted to use W2K because you're having too many crashes with Win98? Maybe before paying for W2K, try to have your 2nd hardrive with Win98 SE, and ONLY the softwares used for the trading. With less programs installed, Win98 SE behaves better and faster, and with a 7200 rpm hardrive, you'll see a difference.
I really appreciate your comments & suggestions. Rogue, thanks also for that link about the removable hard drive frames! I have to resolve this BIOS issue (ugh, Gateway Tech Support) before I continue. If I can resolve that I'm leaning toward Rogue and his set-up... Doji, I can imagine that Win98SE loaded ONLY w/trading software would see an improvement, but I've read in too many places that Win2000 is the way to go for a trading OS. Baron's awesome "hardware" section here on ET also has a terrific graph showing the overall reliability of 98 v.s. Win2000, and 98 lost by a long shot. I think it's worth the money to get 2000, if nothing else then for peace of mind.... Thanks again and may the trading gods be with you all!
Even better, you can do what I did: Just keep you Win98 and install Win2000 ON THE SAME PARTITION! No need to reformat or anything. As long as you have enough space, Windows2000 can just live on your FAT file system. It says that is not recommended, but in trading applications you should hardly notice any difference between FAT and NTFS. Win98 will by default reside on C:\WINDOWS\ while Win2000 will be in C:\WINNT\
Kibo - VERY INTERESTING product! I'll definitely have to consider getting one! Sounds ideal for anyone worried about family members/roommates/friends screwing up their hard drives. Lobster - I'm sure you're a nice person, but what you suggested scares the c**p out of me! I wish you continued stability with that set-up!