Problem with IDE Slave/Master Jumper Settings

sirstinky

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Aug 17, 2012
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Hi! I am having a problem with my ancient PC. It's a 2002-vintage Compaq. It has 2 optical drives DVD ROM and CD-R/RW) (everything's IDE ATA100), floppy, and a 40 GB HDD. When I booted it up, I discovered it had Windows XP and not 98 SE on it as the case said. It was having major validation errors, so I decided to install a new copy of Windows XP. I tried my install disk, but it didn't work. I set the boot order to the CDRW drive first, and that didn't work. I tried swapping the disk to the DVD-ROM drive, and that didn't work either. So I removed the 2 optical drives and kept the DVD-ROm drive. Originally, the 2 CD drives were connected to a single secondary IDE channel together, and the HDD was connected to the primary channel. When I swapped them, I changed the configuration so the HDD and CD drive were on the same channel, and made the jumper settings for the drives to master (HDD) and slave (for CD drive). When I tried to boot, nothing happened and I got a boot disk failure message. in BIOS, no drives were detected despite them being there and hooked up. I tried connecting the CD drive on the 2nd channel by itself, and kept the settings the same, but that didn't work either. I would get a boot disk read error. I tried connecting the HDD on the single channel as master, and it showed up as primary slave and wouldn't boot to Windows on the same error.

Any idea on what's wrong here? Any help is appreciated!

Nick
 
Solution
Oh yes, I can remember the pain of IDE settings!

For each IDE channel, there can only be two devices connected, one designated the master, and the other the slave. This gets designated by those jumper pins on the back of the drive, and both get connected to the MB via the PATA cable that connects to the MB.

When having an issue, I would go to only one device to each IDE port, and it gets designated as a master. The link below has some images, and more details.

http://www.mikeshardware.com/howtos/howto_connect_ide_hd.html

This all makes me appreciate SATA as it was a major step forward!
Oh yes, I can remember the pain of IDE settings!

For each IDE channel, there can only be two devices connected, one designated the master, and the other the slave. This gets designated by those jumper pins on the back of the drive, and both get connected to the MB via the PATA cable that connects to the MB.

When having an issue, I would go to only one device to each IDE port, and it gets designated as a master. The link below has some images, and more details.

http://www.mikeshardware.com/howtos/howto_connect_ide_hd.html

This all makes me appreciate SATA as it was a major step forward!
 
Solution