"nasser jamal" asked:
> Should the new hard drive be the slave or the master...?
For the least work by you, it should be Slave.
The BIOS's *default* HD boot order is
Master, ch. 0,
Slave, ch. 0.
Master, ch. 1,
Slave, ch. 1.
This means that the BIOS will, by default, look first
to the Master on IDE ch. 0 for a HD with a valid
MBR to which to pass control. If there is no HD
there with a valid MBR, it will look to see if there
is a Slave on IDE ch. 0 with a valid MBR to which
to pass control. And etc.
Your BIOS is now set with this default HD boot order,
and your boot files are on the Master HD. You could
move this HD to the Slave position on the same cable
(i.e. on the same IDE channel), but you would have to
reset the HD boot order so that that HD is listed first
in the HD boot order in order for the Slave HD's MBR
to get control.
Alternately, you could leave the BIOS's HD boot order
as it is and make the new HD Master and move the boot
files from the old HD onto the new HD and make the
boot.ini file point to the old HD (which will be called "rdisk(1)")
in order to load the OS from the old HD. If there are more
than 1 partition on the new HD, the partition containing the
boot files must be a Primary partition and it must be marked
"active".
As you can see, it's much easier (but much less educational)
to just make the new data HD something other than Master
on ch. 0 so that the old HD will continue to control booting.
*TimDaniels*