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HD -slave-master help

Grimbones

Senior member
Well my sister receieved a 80GB western digital hard drive to go along with her 40gb maxtor hard drive...she's having some trouble installing it, and to tell you the truth i've built computers, but i've never put more than 2 hard drives in a computer before! So i don't know what needs to be done, so if anyone could give me a step by step process of how it happens, that would be very much appreciated, thank you!
 
Well, you start by finding out what all the IDE devices are set to. If she has one drive now, I assume that is master. If she has optical drives (dvd, cdrom, etc) you need to find what those are set to as well. You want one hard drive on the primary channel as master, with one optical a slave. On the other channel you want another hard drive as master with the other optical as slave. Also, you will likely need to partition and format the new hard drive before it is recognized by windows. Your first concern though is to get all drives seen at the bios level.
 
Alright so first of all i think she tried to change the 80gb one to master, and it doesn't have an OS installed on it yet...

It would probably be a better idea to leave the 40gb as the master right? i'll tell her to change that back to the original one....


I'm not sure i'm getting the optical part that you said, she has both a dvd-rw and a cd-rw...what am i supposed to do with those....😱😕
 
Ok, i think i'm starting to get this...so i want to hook up the hard-drives to seperate IDE cables ? is that what you're saying, because right now they are hooked up to the same cable.
 
Ok, you can hook up the four drives to whatever cable you want. Many times you are limted by the length of the cable. The reason I suggested putting one hard drive on each cable is for maximum performance. In her case, to get it working, focus on getting it working. Assuming you want the 40 gig to stay the primary drive (unless you want to reinstall windows on the 80 gig), put the 40 gig as the primary master drive. You have to set the jumper on the drive to master. Then, hook up another drive (whether it is a cdrom, hard drive, etc) as a slave on that same cable. Check the jumpers again. On the other cable, set one drive to master, one drive to slave. You problem is likely that you have two masters on one cable. You can not set it up that way. Only one master, one slave per cable.
 
Hmm...i think it was set up as you said, the jumpers might be screwed up, so i'll try to check them, thanks for the help, if i can't figure it out i'll get on here and complain later, thanks again.
 
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