Re: [gentoo-user] Windows on a second drive?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On 9/6/05, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Sep 2005 13:12:33 +0100, Michael Kintzios wrote:
> 
> > You're right, at least as far as preparing the installation of WinXP
> > goes.  After it gets installed I would rejumper it to a slave and put
> > the Gentoo drive as a master, assuming of course that Gentoo is the OS
> > used more often and its speed counts more than that of WinXP.
> 
> Is there a speed difference between master and slave?
> 

Hi Neil,
   Assuming they are both the same speed drives (UDMA33/66/100/133)
then there is no speed difference from the drive whether it is set as
a master or slave.

   The issue, and it's a small issue, arises when both the master and
slave are needed at the same time. In this case, even if the slave is
in the process of sending a packet across the EIDE cable, the master
can interrupt that packet and send it's own. After the master finishes
the slave has to restart it's transmission which results in lower
perceived bandwidth even though the bit-rate is identical.

   For this reason, in my systems, I place only a single drive on each
cable and every drive is set to be a master. This then allows the
buffering in the EIDE controller in the chipset to buffer the packets
and put them on the PCI bus without any need to resend.

   I'm not sure any of this is measurable without setting up some
pathological test case, but for instance if you were doing a bunch of
compiles and watching a DVD movie at the same time, and assuming your
DVD drive was a slave drive, you might get some artifacts in the
movie.

   Anyway, thanks to all for the ideas yesterday. It appears that as
the day ended, and being tired, I messed up my Gentoo drive somewhere
in the process of shrinking one partition to make way for the Windows
partition. The system no longer booted last night when I went to bed.
Go figure. I didn't think I was even touching the boot partition.
Today I have to restore that and then I'm going to pull all the drives
except the one for XP, install Windows, and see then if I can get grub
to start it up.

   Note that most brain dead part of this Windows installer
(nahh...it's all brain dead) was that while the XP install requires
that I have at least one 30MB windows-compatible partition on the
primary drive, and while it will create the partition for me, it will
not format the partition and is therefore cannot continue with the
install. (An unformatted, free partition is not 'Windows compatible'!)
How's that for forward thinking? This is Windows XP, not Windows 98.
Dual boot has been around for years but they still cannot handle what
they need for their own operation in that environment. Amazing...

Cheers all,
Mark

Cheers,
Mark

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