How do you master/slave two hard drives together?

Factual Questions
21

Well, here’s a few good rules to help you along if you ever get everything apart. ALWAYS put the master hard drive ABOVE the slave hard drive. This helps a few things… see below.

All (UATA) ribbon cables have the same configuration. If you stretch it out there are 2 connectors kind of close to each other, and one far away. The one far a way always goes to the Motherboard, the one on the opposite end goes to the master, and the one in the middle goes to the slave. Every time. This should help with the ganglion mass of wires you are having trouble with.

In Compaq computers, as someone eluded to above, you usually have to take out the whole hard drive bay assembly. This usually requires only unscrewing ONE screw, and then un-hooking two tabs. (Like, just pulling them out.)

So, look at what the HDD screws to. now look to see if that piece of metal is screwed to the chassis by one screw. If so, unscrew it, then pull from the bottom at an angle til it pops out. you can then manipulate the HDDS to your hearts content.

Safety Tip If you don’t have an electrostatic wrist strap to use, make sure to touch the power supply, or an unpainted portion of the chassis every so often… this discharges any electrostatic build up in your body.

So, now we have master hard drive on top, slave on bottom, and a huge mess of wires. Fear not, it’s not that bad. You only have to make 4 connections. Well, unless you pulled the ribbon out to look at it, then you need to make 5.

Double check your jumpers are in the right positions, and then screw everything in securely. Then begin connection cables. I find it’s easiest to do it in this order. Slave ribbon, master ribbon, slave power supply, master power supply. It’s just easier on the hands.

Don’t freak out if you start up the computer and the screen is blank. It just may mean you got your jumpers wrong.

Also, I agree to set up winXP first on the main computer, then do everything from there.
Any more questions, post them. It would help to know the Hard Drive size, too, so as to know what to recommend as far as partitioning and file structure. (i.e. FAT32 or NTFS)

22

Ohhhh Kayyyyy… So I got the HDD out and plugged it into the new computer. What I need to figure out now is the settings for both jumpers.

In the new computer the ribbon cable has one socket clearly labeled “MASTER” and another labeled “SLAVE,” so that isn’t an issue. I got both attached to the cable and the power plugged into both.

When I power up with both HDDs in place, it says “Operating system not found.” Seems like it’s trying to use the old HDD, which as I said has lost its OS, which is why I need to do this in the first place. When I take out the old HDD and power up, it uses the new HDD that was there already, and Windows boots up just fine.

I’m guessing the problem is the jumper settings. The pictures and descriptions in the linked tutorials do not match the HDDs I have here. The old HDD model is a Quantum Fireball CX. The jumper settings it describes on the label on top are:
CS - Cable Select
DS - Master
PK - Park

Nothing for “slave.” There’s no mention of a J50 on its underside either. There are four pairs of pins where the jumper can go, but only three of them are indicated as above. On the new hard drive, there are likewise four pairs of pins. I tried every possible combination of jumper settings on both of them, but it isn’t clear which is the right combination for making the new one master and the old one the slave.

Man, couldn’t they have designed an easier way to do this? :smack:

23

Try putting them both on Cable Select. If that doesn’t automatically work, reboot and hit F8 til a screen comes up with choices on it. You may be able to choose which OS from there.
Keep us updated.

24

You know what, guys, everybody jumped on daffyduck’s case for asserting “You can’t slave Win98 to XP.” But after talking with my friend about it, I think this may be correct after all and we owe daffy an apology. It stands to reason, the file allocation systems on the two OSs are totally different. Big DUH on my part. My friend says he has an old machine that still runs 98, and I can go over to his place and retrieve my files using it. Hope that works. I bought a big stack of fresh blank CDs to hold my stuff once I get access to it…

25

It is possible, I assure you. :wink:

The new 80 wire IDE cables do support “cable select”; you indicate yours marks the master and slave plugs. These only take effect if both drives are set to “CS” though.

According to this diagram, PK is Quantum-speak for Slave.

Also, when your computer is booting up, part of the POSTing process is usually to print out the configuration of drives. It will probably say what drives are detected in what configuration.

26

I would think that you could, as long as your XP partition is using FAT32 and not NTFS. If it’s NTFS, Win98 will not even know that the NTFS partitions exist.

27

…and to add to the OS file system talk…

Win XP can recognize multiple formats across multiple partitions simultaneously. I have a master boot partition that is FAT32, another partition that is NTFS, and a slaved drive with an NTFS and Linux partition on it.

Win XP can’t see my Linux partition however, it’s invisible. My Linux is able to see and read/write to all of the partitions while within Linux.

28

I don’t know, guys, it looks like the reason I can’t get anywhere with this HDD is that it’s damaged beyond repair. When I set it as master, put it in by itself, and used a book disk to start, it said there’s no partition, no FAT, and can’t read anything from it.

I also heard a weird ping from inside when first powering up. There must be some physical damage inside it. I’m beginning to doubt I will ever be able to recover any files off it without extraordinary (and expensive) measures.

How this HD went bad in the first place… It had gotten such a bad infestation of spyware that it was practically useless, it ran so slow. I used Ad-Aware SE and found over 1,300 spyware and malware files on it. I used Ad-Aware to delete every single one of those. On the next reboot there was an error message that it had no OS anymore and needed a boot disk to start.

29

Well, there’s no way software could damage your drive, but if the POST sequence correctly detects your drive, and yet a Win98 boot disk doesn’t give you access to it, then I’d be figuring that’s possibly the current situation.

One of my own HDs started going bad last month - I had it backed up so I didn’t really care, but occasionally it would cause Win98 to bluescreen, and would take a few reboots for it to even be detected in POST, so it’s now the secondary drive to another. It’s still accessible, but should it get much worse I expect it not to be.