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Very quick question - have two hard drives, is this setup ok ?

UnatcoAgent

UnatcoAgent

Diamond Member
Hi guys

I have an 80 gig SATA maxtor drive in my system now. My roomate has an 80 gig 7200 ata drive lying around, and I want to put it in my system for the time being.

I have two optical drives running off of one IDE channel, should I plug in another IDE cable and put my roomate's HD on that channel ? Does it matter what channel it's on / what colour the IDE port is (black/blue) ?

Any other advice ?

Thanks!
 
I don't think the colours have anything to do with it... but you have 2 HDD's in one case? Isn't that the max?
 
Originally posted by: simms
I don't think the colours have anything to do with it... but you have 2 HDD's in one case? Isn't that the max?
Click to expand...

I thought the colours had to do with which was primary channel and which was secondary, and that was significant as to the heirarchy of the hard drives.

Not sure though.

Anybody ?
 
I am pretty sure the blue is the primary. They added the blue when they went from ata 33 to ata 66. The blue requires the 80 pin cable instead of the 40 pin. I am a little fuzzy on the exact number (ie from 33 to 66 and 80 vs 40 but the principle is correct) I would hook up to the hard drive to the blue connector but make sure the boot option is set to the serial ata in the bios, if that is possible. If your system wont boot after that then hookup one of your optical drives to the blue and the hard drive to the black since it will then hopefully default back to the serial drive if there is not a bootable disk in the optical drive. Watch the drive designation after hooking up the hard drive. If you are using windows 98 the new drive will be D Drive and if you have your other drive partitioned it will shift the second partition to E Drive, etc. The only way I have found to get around this is to partition the new drive with only an extended partition, no primary.

As to the heirechy I am pretty sure the optical drives will be listed last no matter where you put them with the primary drive being listed first.

Hopefully you find this helpful and I have not rambled on with info you already know. God bless.
 
It doesn't matter which channel is one unless you plan to boot from it. If you did, you'd just have to change the boot order in the bios. The blue connector is almost always the primary IDE channel I believe.
 
When you look at the cable the connector in the middle is slave one close to it but on the end is primary. Furthest from slave should be the one that goes to the motherboard. Just set the drive jumpers accordingly. If it's hooked up to slave have it jumpered for slave or try cable select. If you use cs both drives should be jumpered like that. Otherwise jumper the primary drive as primary and the slave as slave.
 
Originally posted by: Viper96720
When you look at the cable the connector in the middle is slave one close to it but on the end is primary. Furthest from slave should be the one that goes to the motherboard. Just set the drive jumpers accordingly. If it's hooked up to slave have it jumpered for slave or try cable select. If you use cs both drives should be jumpered like that. Otherwise jumper the primary drive as primary and the slave as slave.
Click to expand...

Jumped as slave - everything worked.

THANKS GUYS
 
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