Funny you should talk about master/slave combo, I have found the problem.

I have the HD and DVD on one IDE cable. Before it was, master= HD and DVD= slave but I have swapped them round and now works faster. I copied over about, 4GB worth of files and it took 15 minutes.

That is much quicker than taking about an hour or more before. I think my DVD drive is one of them that, has to be on master.

Cheers for the replies anyway.

Usually (back in the W98SE days) the best setup was to have C: as Primary master, main CD drive as Secondary master...any other drives were usually an annoyance.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

Usually (back in the W98SE days) the best setup was to have C: as Primary master, main CD drive as Secondary master...any other drives were usually an annoyance.

Yup. It's always better to have the HDDs running on one IDE channel and the opticals on the secondary as the opticals will commonly run at slower speeds and will cause a data bottleneck and impact negatively on overal performance.

This thread brings me back to to my old W98 build. I remember proudly installing my Voodoo 2 for state of the art graphics for gaming!!!