A while back my dear friend CuriousCanuck gave me his box, sans hard drive. I put in my old HD and the setup immediately recognized it, no problem. (Many other problems ensued, but I finally ended up with a smoking system. I brought my old HD into work, backed up everything important, re-formatted the HD, did a fresh install of Windows, copied back the data, brought it home, and it still works like a charm - knock wood.) But the ever-so-lovely CC also sent me a freshly-formatted HD (for services rendered… ;)).
Primary IDE: my hard drive
Primary slave: CD-ROM
Secondary IDE: none
Secondary slave: none
I want to install the spare HD, mainly as a place to dump data (read: porn), so that I can keep program files on the same drive as Windows.
Now, every site I’ve gone to makes a big deal about master/slave configurations. I know how to switch the jumpers on the HD, but I’d rather not, if I don’t have to.
What would happen if, using a separate ribbon cable to the secondary IDE connector on the mobo, I installed the spare HD as a secondary master? (No jumper switching involved.) Disaster? Or would it just boot with my primary master (as it does now), recognize the CD-ROM as the primary slave, and then see the new HD as the secondary master?
Do I really have to have this master/slave thing going on with the hard drives? It’s enough that I have it in my relationship with jeremy evil.
Help, quick. I want to do this tonight, before installing Photoshop.
Make the 2nd harddrive as the primary slave, and your cdrom as secondary master. Use the 80wire ribbon for the harddrives and the 40wire ribbon for the cdrom
Yeah, that’s what every single web site says. I just don’t want to screw around with the current configuration, only add a hard drive as secondary master. I want to know if that’s a bad thing.
It’s not the best way to do it, but it will work. You will probably have to go into setup and have it detect the drive. Your machine will continue to boot off the Primary Master unless you deliberately change the boot order.
Windows may add the new drive as D:, but you should be able to change it to whatever letter you want.
There’s no big deal here. Make it the master on the Secondary IDE. In fact, unless there is another device on the secondary IDE channel, you have no choice but to make it the master. Most hard drives come with the jumper set at CS (cable select) so there’s mostly no issue on setting it to master/slave (but I have had problems with 2 hard drives duking it out on the same channel). Unless your computer is from the days of the 486, your BIOS will recognize it without a problem, but you may have to enable that secondary IDE slot for it to work (see your system manual for more instructions).
Unless you have WindowsNT, 2000, or XP, you won’t be able to pick your drive letter; DOS will assign it automatically. Even then, NT based operating systems won’t let you change the boot drive or system drive letters, which shouldn’t be a problem for you since everything is already on the first drive.
No, there is no problem with what you are doing. As long as the new drive is jumpered as a master (or probably if it is jumpered as “cable select”) and you use an 80 wire cable, it should be fine. At least it won’t be any worse than it is now. Some CD manufacturers prefer to have their devices on 40 wire cables but if it’s working fine now, no problem.
This configuration will give you a slight advantage in copying from one hard disk to the other. If you have a high speed CD-R, you might want to put the source to be copied on the secondary hard disk for maximum CD writing speed.
Exactly. Not the best way, but it will work well enough. In normal everyday use there shouldn’t be a real difference between these configurations. Just attach the new drive to secondary IDE cable and check the auto-detection in setup when turning on the computer.
The boot order shouldn’t be a problem since old drive is still primary master, but also important is that new drive should have only Extended DOS Partition (with logical drives in it) and no Primary Partition at all. If this is not the case, it’s fortunately easy to change as you’re dealing with already formatted hard drive.
Adding the drive as the master of the 2nd channel will not affect anything. The only way the system would try to boot off the secondary master would be if it did not find the boot files on the primary master
Well, I had lots of problems, and the second HD is not installed. It turns out it was a display card issue … I’d get these “beep beep beep beep” things on startup (I sound like the stoned Apple chick) and the HD would load, and I’m sure it was trying to tell me something, but without a display, there’s not much you can do. Then I figured the power supply was flaky… Meanwhile my other half is getting more and more angry with me.
Anyway, I’m back to my original setup. I’ll install the other HD as a secondary master. Speed between drives isn’t an issue. I just need a place to dump all my stuff.