Installing Hard Drives

[veronicak5678]

I was trying to remove a hard drive from my computer and now I can't get BIOS to load. How do I hook up one disk drive and one hard drive? I am confused about master/slave and where the connections go.

 

[T_T]

Welcome, Newcomer. The Master/Slave relationship only applies to IDE interface drives, so I'll assume that's what you're using. The easiest way to accomplish this relationship is to set both HDD to Cable Select, or CS. On your HDD, you should see some kind of diagram that indicates how to set up the jumper.

Once you have the jumper set correctly, simply connect the "Master" connector to the HDD that you wish to boot from, and then connect the "Slave" connector to the other HDD. Note that the Slave drive can only be used for storage when connected in Slave mode. Lastly, connect the ribbon cable to the motherboard, if not done so already.

If you're using the same ribbon style cable to connect an optical drive with your HDD, the HDD must be connected to the "Master", and the ODD gets connected to the "Slave". In this scenario, you must ensure that either CS is used on both the HDD and the ODD, or that you have configured the HDD jumper to "Master", and the ODD jumper to "Slave".

Anything other than described above will cause boot failure.