Boot Lock and Hard Disk Selection System: The NickLock

Installation, Continued

Choosing The Hard Drive

The key switch has three different positions: Left, right and middle. This picture shows the key at middle position, which causes neither of the drives to be accessible to the system, effectively creating a lock. If you switch the key to left position, it selects the drive on the left by having its cable close its master jumper.

Although it might have been useful to include a setting that lets you choose both drives, there is probably a good reason why NickLock only allows you to select between single drives or none. For one thing, only a few drives run as slave by default if no jumper mode is set. The majority of drives run in single or master mode by default, and if you use two of them, there is no way to assign the specific drives to master or slave, thus causing a conflict.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.