Changing master/slave settings on optical drives?

[TubeTote]

I just built a new computer (not the one in my signature) and have the following problem...my system tries to boot to the optical drive. After the intitial boot screen, a message pops up saying "no ide device". If I press F1 it will boot to the HDD. In the bios, the optical drive is set to master and the HDD to slave. I cannot find a way to change this. I was thinking that maybe the jumper on the optical drive is set to master, but there are no markings on the pins and nothing in the manuel regarding the subject. The IDE cable was installed correctly with the slave plug in the optical drive and the master plug in the HDD...and on that subject, would it be better to use two cables to connect the two devices? This is a very small Aria case so more cables would need to be worth a performance boost.

 

[corkyg]

Sony

Scroll to the bottom of the article for comments and illustrations re jumpers.

 

[Mavtech]

Isn't it still common practice to only have optical drives and hard drives on separate IDE channels? Is this possible in your system? Or do you only have one IDE channel?

 

[jagilbertvt]

I agree w/ Mavtech. If at all possible use 2 seperate ide cables, as you'll get better performance when burning discs and installing software from the optical drive.

 

[TubeTote]

Thanks much for the replies, they are appreciated. This is an Asus DVD-RW drive...and even though I do have the jumper pins they are not marked. My system works fine with both devices connected to the primary IDE on my motherboard (with the exception of my master/slave problem). You guys seem to be telling me that I will get better performance by having the HDD connected to the primary IDE and the optical drive connected to the secondary...it makes sense to me though I don't know the technical details. The only challange will be finding a short, rounded IDE cable...they are always so damn long.

 

[themisfit610]

Yes you will get better performance. With the IDE interface, you can only use one device at a time. So let's examine one scenario: copying data from one device to another, burning discs, ripping music/dvds etc.

In this case one device wants to always read, and one device wants to always write. Only one thing can happen at a time, so the IDE controller goes back and forth. This leads to much slower transfer speeds. This is a major plus of SCSI and SATA, because the issue does not apply to them (SATA = 1 device per channel, SCSI can handle multiple devices per channel). Using both IDE channels will let you simultaneously read on one device and write on the other.

Good luck

 

[TubeTote]

OK...I just pulled out the single IDE cable and replaced it with two short rounded IDE cables. I now have the HDD plugged into the primary IDE on the board, and the optical drive to the secondary. I have noticed a performance gain, so thanks to the above for the advice. Problem is, the computer still thinks that the optical drive is the master and it won't boot to the HDD unless I press F1 after the error message in the boot sequence. Anybody have any solution to this? If it is a jumper setting, then how do I know which jumper to use since there are no markings? Thanks to all in advance

 

[TubeTote]

Hi all, thanks for reading my post but the problem has been solved...turns out it was the jumper on the HDD...it was set to "cable select" mode. Changed it to master and all is well.