Slave drive set up

[brysonblack]

I have a bunch of hard drives that I need to plug into my desktop computer as a slave drive. I connected a hard drive and tried to go into the boot sequence and do it myself but for some reason I cant get the slave to be recognized and/or boot with the master/primary drive. I connected both the electrical and digital feed wires to the slave but it wasnt recognized in the boot sequence and/or primary and secondary list options. PLEASE HELP!

 

[almartin]

I take it that your drive is an IDE drive. You will have to set the jumper on the drive to slave and make sure your data cable slave connection is hooked up to the drive. As far as booting to a slave drive I don't think you can as it would have to be the primary drive but it should show up in MY Computer where you could save files or do backups to it..

 

[brysonblack]

thanks for the feedback. I know just enough to get myself in trouble and it's been a long while sense I've messed with this stuff. what is the jumper..... is that one of the connection cables I plug into the slave? How do I tell if my hard drive is an IDE drive? They are all old ones. the one I'm working with right now is a quantum fireball lct 40 gig. thanks so much for the feedback.

 

[brysonblack]

In addition I am just trying to access the files of the drive I'm trying to install, I do not need it for any other reason than to access and move files from it to the primary boot drive.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Brysonblack

What do the data cables look like? If they are ribbon cables with 40 pins, then these are IDE drives and master / slave applies. If they are the narrower cables with seven pins, then these are SATA drives and master / slave does not apply.

Whoops. Quantum fireball. That's old, and an IDE drive indeed. So. Each IDE cable can connect to two IDE drives. One of them, or the only one, must have the jumpers set to "Master." The other, if you connect two drives to the same cable, must be set up as the "Slave."

Jumpers are tiny fiddly little connectors that will short out a pair of pins on the back of the drive; I always use needle-nose pliers to handle them.

Here's a picture of someone with fingers smaller than mine installing a jumper: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1778&page=4 . Not that this particular drive has the pin assignments neatly printed on the circuit board by the pairs of pins.

Is your current boot drive an IDE drive also? Can you tell us what model motherboard you have, or at least how many IDE connectors it has? What version of the OS are you running?

Finally, are you familiar with the BIOS menus, which can make the troubleshooting a little easier for us?

(Please note that the names Master and Slave may not be used in California, where the drives must be referred to as Primary and Secondary, pursuant to state low 143.23.a)