Optical, Hard drive, and Master/Slave Question

Jc Hawk

Member
Apr 14, 2005
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I have just about everything done but before I install the os I have a question.
I am not sure if I have the Master and Slave set up correctly. I have One CD burner One DvD burner and my hard drive. I have one IDE cable from the MoBo that has 2 connectors for 2 devices. So each burner is connected by way of one IDE cable to the MoBo. I set the jumper on the CD drive to Slave thinking that the SATA connection to my hard drive would be master by default. I left the jumper on the DvD burner alone because the port wasn't labeled. I can correct if needed by trial and error I guess. So I went into my Bios and have the drives set up like this:


IDE Channel 0 Master NEC (DvD Burner)
IDE Channel 0 Slave Sony (CD Burner)
IDE Channel 1 Master None
IDE Channel 1 Slave None
IDE Channel 2 Master None
IDE Channel 3 Master SATA

The above is exactly as bios shows to be the current set up.

The Boot Sequence is FDD, CD rom, and finaly Hard Disk Drive.

Hope I haven't left anything out. Thanks in advance from a helpless noob.

 

Calin

Diamond Member
Apr 9, 2001
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You need to set (force) the jumpers on the optical drives, or let them on Cable Select.
The SATA drives work only a single drive per channel, so you have nothing to select.
You might want to have each optical on its own channel (however, two cables will make a mess)
 

Calin

Diamond Member
Apr 9, 2001
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They don't share the same IDE channel. It helps when you have an old PIO mode and an UDMA drive, as (I think) at least older IDE controllers were unable to use two devices with different accessing modes - so both drives would work as the lowest one.
Also, IDE channel sharing hurts when you have a low CDROM and a hard drive, as the hard drive will wait for the channel to become available before being able to communicate (remember, IDE is a single command interface, so until that command is responded to, nothing else happen).
It's not so much a problem to have the optical drives on the same channel, however I (personally) would prefer them to be on different channels.

Calin
 

superfly27

Senior member
Jun 25, 2005
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Boy, you must be a lot smarter than I am. I just took out the jumper on my WD Caviar PATA HD, I connected it to the main IDE connector. Then I connected the DVD burner with a different IDE cable to the secondary IDE connector. Then the floppy drive. That's it. My machine works. First time build too.
 

Calin

Diamond Member
Apr 9, 2001
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I am not smarter, I just read this somewhere or somewhere else. As for the cables, I cut my CDROM cable (non-ATA66) on the length and packed it together. It looks now more like a rounded cable, and (while it doesn't look by far as good as an original round cable) in a closed case it works just fine
 

nebula

Golden Member
Apr 4, 2001
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Originally posted by: superfly27
Boy, you must be a lot smarter than I am. I just took out the jumper on my WD Caviar PATA HD, I connected it to the main IDE connector. Then I connected the DVD burner with a different IDE cable to the secondary IDE connector. Then the floppy drive. That's it. My machine works. First time build too.

That's exactly how I would do a single hard drive, single DVD setup. I've done many builds and also that's what Calin was saying.
 

nebula

Golden Member
Apr 4, 2001
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Just a note, cable select only works with an 80 conductor cable. Sometimes the mobo comes with a 40 conductor cable for the opticals. So if you have an 80 conductor cable, just jumper the burners to cable select, hook them on the same cable to the Primary IDE channel. The one on the end of the cable with be the master but it doesn't really matter which drive is. The blue end of the cable goes on the mobo, if it's not labeled. If a 40 conductor cable, you'll need to jumper one as master and one as slave, same cable, same port.

Technically, a SATA drive is a master because it's the only one on a channel. The only time master/slave comes into play is with two devices on the same cable. The SATA drive had no influence on the burners. That's where I think where you're getting confused.

In summary, if you had each burner on a seperate cable, they'd both be masters.

Cable select is the easiest to use, ditch all your 40 conductor cables, then you'll never have to worry about changing jumpers if you move things around.