Potpurri

[jdhurst]

Somewhere else I noted (along with others) that trying to boot the same license for XP in the ultra bay (as in the main drive) caused problems with the onset of SP2. I had booted the same license succesfully from the ultrabay with SP1. This feature allowed me to build up a new drive over time while booting back to the production drive for business.

Right now, my main XP system runs on a 60 Gb 7200-rpm hard drive.

I got my Windows Vista Ultimate Beta 2 DVD the other day, and set it up on a spare 60 Gb 7200-rpm hard drive and had it all working. Not wishing to tempt fate, I set up an XP SP2 system on a spare 12 Gb very slow hard drive.

Two results:
1. The 12 Gb drive is probably a 3600-rpm drive, although it may be a 4200-rpm drive. In the same T41, it is painfully slow - easily half as fast as the 7200-rpm drive. It seems conclusive to me that hard drive speed is a major performance opportunity - better, it seems to me than memory or CPU (assuming you have the basic minimums of 512Mb and 1.4Ghz or thereabouts).

2. Vista was working just fine. I put the drive in the ultrabay and booted from the ultrabay and Vista won't boot. It says a certain file (forget which one) is not working properly and I need the install CD to correct it. Of course I cannot do this this with the ultrabay occupied by a hard drive.

I have some work to do here, but it is getting right picky to move hard drives about with SP2 or Vista installs.
... JD Hurst

[sugo]

I was planning to buy an ultrabay slim HDD adapter for similar purpose. Perhaps I should think twice.

Isn't the adapter a native secondary IDE connection? I can understand Vista is in beta. I wonder what XP SP2 is compaining about.

[GomJabbar]

As an experiment, I put a cloned drive in the Ultrabay Slim slot of my T42, and removed the drive from the main slot. I was able to boot just fine this way (Win XP PRO SP2).

I removed the drive from the main slot to avoid possible conflicts of same Windows License as JDHurst referred to. Even if the drive in the main slot had a different version of Windows, you could still run into drive letter problems if the OS was installed on drive C and now it becomes drive D in the Ultrabay Slim slot because of a drive C being in the main slot.