I have a Pentium 4 with Windows 2000 on it.

An extra hard drive was installed on the computer. The
hard drive was connected to the second of two IDE
ATA/ATAPI connectors. The hard drive was formated and
now shows up for use.

The computer has a Primary IDE Channel, a secondary IDE
channel, and a Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller.

After having both hard drives connected to the IDE
connector how do I know what channel each hard drive is
using? And that this is the optimal setting?

"Jim" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:234101c427c0$9eaae320$(E-Mail Removed)...
> I have a Pentium 4 with Windows 2000 on it.
>
> An extra hard drive was installed on the computer. The
> hard drive was connected to the second of two IDE
> ATA/ATAPI connectors. The hard drive was formated and
> now shows up for use.
>
> The computer has a Primary IDE Channel, a secondary IDE
> channel, and a Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller.
>
> After having both hard drives connected to the IDE
> connector how do I know what channel each hard drive is
> using? And that this is the optimal setting?

If your drives are using separate cables (each hard drive is on its own
cable connecting to the port on the motherboard) then they are using
separate channels. Conversely, if they are connected to the same cable,
they are sharing a single channel. Most would agree that having each drive
use its own channel will give you the best performance in most situations.

To find out (in the softwaresy Windows way) how your drives are connected,
do this:

Open Device Manager (Start->Settings->Control
Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager)
Select View->Devices by Connection
Burrow down through the tree through ACPI PC->ACPI-Compliant System->PCI
Bus->IDE Controller
(Your devices will be slightly different, but if you can correctly install a
hard drive you can figure that out
Check each channel to see what drive is connected to it.