Easy question regarding ide connection

blackspeedo

Distinguished
Nov 7, 2009
6
0
18,510
hey guys,

im trying to connect a hdd (top in pic), and a dvd drive (bottom) through one ide connection in my mobo. these are both pata. I know that to hook these up, i need a jumper, and there is a jumper set to slave for the dvd drive, but i was given the dvd drive and it does not have a jumper...but i read that usually devices like these are set to master by default...

will this work if i hook this up? do i need to buy a jumper? what about cable select? (have no clue what it does)

thank you
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
You have two routes possible, but you WILL need one or more jumpers. When you put two devices on an IDE port, one MUST be the Master, and the other MUST be the Slave. In your situation, it is advised that the HDD be the Master. Set its jumpers that way. Then plug it into the END connector on the ribbon cable. Set the jumpers on the optical drive to Slave and plug it into the middle connector.

The other route is to set BOTH devices to "CS" for "Cable Select". When you do that the END device will be the Master, so make sure it is the HDD.

If you don't have enough jumper bits to do this job, go to any computer shop and ask them to sell / give you one or two. Just make sure it is ones for setting up IDE drives, and not the smaller ones used recently on some SATA drives for other purposes.