What to do next?

I have Win 7 with 3.1 USB drivers booting from an M2 on a Z390-E mobo and the M2 is listed as disk 0. I can't believe I did it without your help but I'm right where I want to be.

Now I want to add 3 HDDs:

Work
Data, and
Backup (manual, mirror source to target, when I feel like it. A dupe of Work)

For this I bought three new 2TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs

• Can I just add HDDs from this point?
• Do they have to be mentioned in the BIOS?
• Should they be designated as GPT or MBR?
• Can you think of anything I should know before I screw up?

Thanks - rev

If the computer gets stolen or the room burns down, having the backup drive inside the computer would be a bad idea.

Thanks, good tip. What about my other questions, can I just go ahead?

I would add them one at a time.... Pretty sure the BIOS must be set to GPT.

>Pretty sure the BIOS must be set to GPT.
That's where I'm confused and don't have enough knowledge. It's definitely the best partition type but I'm not sure if type has to match type, i.e. MBR in the BIOS, MBR disk designation, or if type matters at all. It doesn't seem to, I have a mixture of types at the moment and no errors or protests from the system. I'll read up.

Before connecting the drives, check the manual for the motherboard. Some motherboards share the M2 connection and one of the SATA ports, so you can only use either the M2 connection OR the shared SATA port.

Note: I have not read the motherboard manual for your motherboard to check whether this is true for your board.

Hey JD, I've missed you but I got through it. I cloned the HDD to the SSD with Macrium (Macrium rocks and it's free) the process went flawlessly, I checked by removing all the other drives. The BIOS got happy immediately and I couldn't believe it was that easy.

No, there's nothing about sharing in the manual. The M2 is a little card that pushes into a little thing held by double sided sticky padding and a dust cover. I've already added one disk and copied 500 gigs to it. The system doesn't seem to care if the disks are GPT or MBR.

Win 7 on Z390-E was not an easy thing to do! I bought 3.1 USB drivers from a guy in China and injected them into the installation. MS tried everything in their power to prevent users doing that, even MBAM has to be signed, or you have to use a lesser legacy version. I'm proud of myself for pulling it off, it's been 14 years since I was an Oracle DBA.

You guys rock! Thanks for all the help.

John: Which part was the good tip?

Some motherboards share the M2 connection and one of the SATA ports