no master hard drive found but computer boots up?

PCnub1812

Honorable
Dec 20, 2013
14
0
10,510
hello,

i recently put my computer back together and i could not get it to boot up. when it tries to boot up, it stops on a black screen with a white line flashing at the top left. i did some research and i found out that it is most likely a problem with the hard drive. since i have 2 hard drives i unplugged one to see which one is the master and slave. what i found out was very weird. with the master drive connected the black screen would show up. and without the master drive the computer would boot up all the way and shut down after 10-20 seconds. maybe i got it all wrong and i just want to confirm; the master drive is the one with the small jumper right? when i unplugged the drive with the jumper the computer booted up all the way but before that it gave me a message saying that the master is not plugged in and asked if i want to continue, i pressed F1 to continue and it booted up.

for the second problem: the computer still shuts down after 10-20 seconds without the master plugged in. what am i supposed to do?
 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
Master & Slave was used in old PATA/IDE drives which used a fat ribbon cable. Modern SATA motherbd still maintain this nomenclature but if your motherbd is sata then ignore the following.

The master drive is the one with the jumper set as Master (sometimes denoted as M) and the slave drive is the one with the jumper in the slave position. (denoted S)

Different drives have different jumper positions for these so you will need to look on each drives label to see the various jumper options/positions.

The other option to supporting 2 drives on one cable besides master/slave is to set them both to Cable Select (denoted as CS) You cannot mix M/S with CS (ie you cannot have 1 drive set as Slave and 1 set as CS)

with 2 drives on one ribbon cable its best to put the master on the end and the slave in the middle. This is also the default positions for the CS setting.