Hard drive question?

[cns]

What would happen if i put a second hard drive in and accidently set the jumper to 'master' but connected it to the slave 40 pin connector,

in your opinion:

would it boot up and work?

show as a new HD in 'my computer'

Thanks for any replies

[matz]

dono, try it and find out?

[system7]

Firstly, never use those old 40 core cables that were sometimes used on CD drives.

Always use the finer, faster Ultra ATA 80 core ribbons with a blue motherboard connector, and grey(slave) and black(master) drive connectors.

Secondly, always use a single jumper CS/Cable Select and then the master/slave bit is taken care of by the position on the cable.

If you mix a HD and optical on the same cable it runs at the speed of the slowest drive, which is UDMA mode 4, i.e 66 MHz.

If you put the optical on the Primary IDE, the bios will usually sort it out correctly anyway. You can set boot order in the bios. CD before HD is ideal.

But do experiment. Nothing will blow up. :D

[cns]

Right guys,

Thanks for the replys,

The story goes like this:

I put a 120gb HD along side the original 40gb both on cable select, no problem :)

I got the dragon, I mean mother-in-law, an 80gb HD and went to put it in, (the hard drive that is :wink: ) along side the existing HD, only to find it wasn't as simple as mine was i.e. cable select, so i thought i had set the jumper to slave, booted it up, everything works fine with no problems so i thought it must be right, then shes taken it to a so called expert and he's said the computer is all corrupt cos some idiot (THATS ME!) has set the secondary HD to master and so had 2 drives set for master and its fooked it :oops: he says he's going to stay up all night to try and sort it out.

system 7,
it may have had the black and grey connectors, i can't remember

[system7]

A hard drive will always be installed on an 80 core.

You CAN use Master/slave jumpering to force the issue AS LONG AS THE POSITION ON THE CABLE is also correct and you don't mix CS and Master/Slave jumpering on the same ribbon.

Where it gets deep is that different brands of drive have loads of different layouts on jumpering, and you really have to check them individually at the manufacturers website. Or take them out and read the label on the drives.

Seagate:
http://www.seagate.com/images/support/en/us/useries6family.gif
WD:
http://support.wdc.com/images/drives/jumpers/jumpers.gif

Maxtor support can be found here (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/).

The real lesson from this is to always set to CS and make life easy. But I doubt if any real harm will be done to files. The MIL's expert friend is being melodramatic. :)

[cns]

Mmmmm......

It was a seagate that i put in,

whats bothering me is that the HD already in had 2 jumpers in and when you looked at it i'd say was set in an 'L' shape, waht does this mean? it's definetley not cable select so i thought it must have been 'master' so i set the other to 'slave' everything worked fine,

I'm now wondering if he has done something and trying to pass the blame, if you know what i mean :?

Cheers

[system7]

Without knowing what the original drive was, I really couldn't say. :?

This could be a case of hard drive failure or anything. It doesn't take much effort to disconnect a slave drive anyway.

Perhaps MIL had a Hitachi "DeathStar" (sic), which is a legendary Turkey amongst hard drives, only second to WD in failure rates....

Anyway, it's not your problem now. Let him get on with it. :roll:

[cns]

Ha-ha :D

The original hard drive was a fiji something or other, can't quite remember,

Cheers again anyway

:D :D