Corkyg suggested:
"Try jumpering the PATA drive to SLAVE since it is not the boot drive. "
Not quite right, but a common confusion.
Master and Slave pertain to IDE (aka PATA) port connections, and NOT to which is the boot drive. Well, there is a relationship - see later.
All IDE ports were designed to handle two devices on one shared port and cable. To do this they required that each device be identified. A mobo may have one or two IDE ports and usually they will be called by the system as IDE0 and IDE1. On each of these ports there may be two devices, #0 and #1. If it is used at all, an IDE port MUST have a Master device on it. If there is a second one, too, then it MUST be the Slave. There are two ways this can be done. The original method was that every IDE device has a block of jumper pins on the back and one or more jumpers. Placing the jumper(s) on the right pins sets that device as Master or Slave. (Sometimes there is a difference in jumper settings between Master with No Slave, and Master with Slave Present.) The other alternative introduced later was Cable Select. In this system if the mobo and both devices use it, BOTH devices are set to Cable Select (CS) on their jumpers, and the Master device will be the one connected to the far end of the cable; the Slave will be in the middle. In fact, even for systems that have Master and Slave specifically set, it is still recommended that the Master be connected to the far end of the cable. By the way, if one IDE port has both a hard drive and an optical drive on it, it is recommended that the hard dive be the Master. This is because some (not all) optical drives cannot perform as Master when a hard drive also is sharing the port and cable.
The new SATA systems only allow one device on a port, so there is no Master or Slave in a SATA connection. (Some SATA drives have a jumper block used for a different purpose - compatibility with SATAI or SATAII controllers - but this is NOT for Master etc.)
Now to the Boot Drive point. When IDE systems were the only way, it was common to assume that the Boot Device would be the Master on the IDE0 port. Windows automatically supplied letter labels for IDE devices in this sequence: C: was IDE0 Master, D: was IDE1 Master, E: was IDE0 Slave, and F: was IDE1 Slave. Later BIOS's were introduced to allow a Boot Sequence to be specified; likewise, Windows began to allow the user to change the letter labels applied to each device. But it was this original default assumption that the IDE0 Master will be the Boot Device called C: that is the root of current confusion.
Enter the age of SATA. Most mobo's by default will assume the boot device is the IDE0 Master if there is one at all. If not, they usually try for the SATA0 port. But many users will go into the BIOS and set the Boot Priority to something customized to their needs. Even a complete new machine will be set to something suitable by the manufacturer. So it is entirely likely that the boot device will NOT be the Master on IDE0. More importantly, setting an IDE drive to Master does NOT make it the boot device. That setting is done in the BIOS Boot Priority screens. And remember that, if you have two devices on an IDE port, you can't just go changing the jumpers on one to make it a Master. You also need to check that the second device is set to Slave (so there's no conflict of identification), and maybe you should be sure they are plugged into the right connectors on the cable.
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