by Jason Offiong

Editor’s note: this is compiled from three “daily comments” on our home page.

This topic has received a fair bit of media coverage lately, so I'll add my ¢ worth to the "configuring your system" discussion.  The reason I'm bringing this up right now is because I've re-installed my operating systems several times in the past few weeks. 

The first and most important thing to do when setting up a new system or re-building an existing one is to partition your drive.  This is done using the old DOS holdover, FDISK.  If you have a large drive (15 GB or more), allocate a 3 or 4 GB partition for each OS you intend to install.  Finally, make a common partition out of the rest of the free space on your physical hard drive.  This last partition will store all of your personal files, downloads, backups of your e-mails, contacts, favorites, etc.  For instance, my 40 GB HDD has a 4 GB C: drive with Win ME installed on it, a 4 GB D: drive with Win 2000 (my primary OS) installed on it and a 32 GB E: drive with all of my files.  This way, I can re-format C: and D: at will, knowing that all of my personal files are safe (N.B. remember you have to back up your favorites and e-mail and any other odd-ball files you want to keep from your C: and D: drives BEFORE re-formatting, and of course, make sure you have all the drivers for your hardware that you're going to need to re-install).

If you're running more than one OS, you'll have to install your apps in every OS in which you plan to use them.  Also, remember that some OS's can use disk file systems that others can't read. For my system, I make all of my partitions FAT32 since both Win ME and Win 2000 can read them.  I debated making my D: drive NTFS, but then I'd run the risk of not being able to read a file on that drive from Win ME and would have to re-boot into Win 2000, copy the file to another drive, and re-boot again back into Win ME.  Also remember that Win NT4 and earlier cannot read FAT32 drives so make sure you know the capabilities of your OS's before installing them.

I also install games onto the E: drive.  This way, once I've re-installed the OS and the games I want to play, my save games and characters are all intact.

As I mentioned last time, I've formatted and installed my hard drive several times in the past few weeks.  I've finally gotten every thing running just the way I want it, but I ran into a few oddities on the IDE bus along the way.  So, here's a quick discussion on setting up your IDE devices.  Later this week, I'll discuss configuring your operating systems to use them.

First, most motherboards come with two IDE connectors (a primary and a secondary), each of which can support up to two devices (one master and one slave). However, more and more mobos (e.g. Abit BE6, Asus A7V, etc) are including aftermarket IDE controllers to add extra features that the onboard chip-set doesn't support and have additional connectors.  For the time being, let's assume we're working with a 2 connector mobo, like my Asus CUSL2.  I have four IDE devices:  a HDD, a DVD, a CD-RW and an internal Zip drive.

So, what configuration on the motherboard do I use?  Well, since my HDD is where most of the data gets transferred back and forth, it is the master on the primary channel.  Also, even though my Plextor 1210A features BURN-Proof technology, I still want to have that device be the primary on its channel, hence it sits on the secondary IDE channel.  Now comes a decision time.  Where do I put the DVD and the Zip drive for optimal performance?  Even though two devices can share and IDE channel, that doesn't mean that they can both transfer data on the channel simultaneously.  If I were to put my DVD on the same channel as the CD-RW, I could potentially run into problems when doing an on the fly CD copy.  Therefore, I put the DVD as slave on the primary channel and since I never burn CDs directly from a Zip disk, it can safely sit as slave on the secondary channel.

If you have four IDE channels and four devices, set all of them to be the master on a separate channel.  However, this will make the inside of your case as ugly as they come with all those ribbon cables and could potentially have an impact on cooling.  As always, you'll have to balance your performance and stability requirements (or wait until Serial ATA becomes a reality).

 This will be the last comment on IDE issues for a while at least, I promise.  A few weeks ago, I made recommendations on how you should set up the OS’s on your machine and then told you how to configure your IDE devices.  This week lets put the two together and configure your IDE devices within Windows.

 I can’t stress enough the importance of enabling DMA (Direct Memory Access) on all of your IDE devices that support it.  DMA allows data transfers to occur faster within your system by allowing a device to communicate directly with your system’s RAM without having to go through the CPU.  This allows the transfer to happen more quickly and frees the CPU to do other things. For instance, depending on your CD-RW, enabling DMA can make the CPU utilisation drop from 50 or 60 percent to 2 or 3 percent when copying a disc.  This means there is less chance of a dreaded buffer underrun. 

Conclusion