so the end has to be the master?
Here's a quick breakdown:
Your hardware
- Your computer has at least two (traditional) IDE connectors (see the mobo picture, circled green and blue). The "first" IDE controller is usually coloured blue or separated somehow (also it tends to be closer to the CPU but thats highly dependent on the mobo, consult the manual if you're not certain .. or squint ... usually its also written on the board). Its not horribly important that drives are installed onto certain controllers but its more of "convention" to have the booting harddrives connected on the "first" channel and the optical drives on the "second" channel
- Some motherboards have more IDE connectors, provided by RAID controllers or other special thingies (circled red) Usually its not a good idea to install your optical drives (especially if you've only got one) on the RAID controller as in some/many cases you cant easily boot off it (thus meaning you cant install a new OS or something)
- Looking at the standard IDE cable, the connector labeled '1' gets plugged into the motherboard (its the connector with the biggest space between the any two connectors). Traditionally, the connector that's the farthest from the one connected to the mobo (labeled as '3') is used for "master" and the one in the middle is used for "slave". This is ONLY important if you have your drives set as "cable select" or CS
Whats this Slave/Master/Cable Select Deal?
- The IDE interface that we've looked at here is capable of having two deviced connected along any given cable. Two differentiate between the two, the computer refers to them either as "Master" or "Slave". There is no performance difference in connected along either although its convention to have your more important drives (Harddrive > Burner > Reader) drive set as master and the less important ones as slave. Its just preference
- Now with CS/Cable-select, you can avoid some of the confusion with Master and Slave and stuff because, if you just set all your devices to Cable Select it will just work itself out according to the '1', '2', '3' convention I noted above.
- Why would anyone not use CS? Because on some motherboards, espeically older ones, you have very limited access to the device list (i.e., you can only select to "Master" devices for instance) for setting boot priority. Also it's nice to have a "known" and "intentional" configuration rather than "letting the computer do whatever".
So how do I set the master/slave/cs settings?
- Looking at the jumper picture, you can relate to your harddrive or your optical drive. In *general* the Master Jumper will be the leftmost (as pictured) and the Slave jumper will be the second-left-most and the Cable-select option is the 3rd-left-most. Refer to the stickers and labels on the drives to be sure. Some drives have multiple ways you can set a given configuration (usually the Slave option)
- Now that you're familiar with how to setup those jumpers, make sure you dont have a "master-slave" collision: what this means is that two devices on a chain are both set to one thing (i.e., master and master). When this happens, one device will "win" the tug of war and when you boot up you'll be 'missing' a device.
- Dont think that you're "off the hook" if you use Cable Select either -- if you use CS, make sure its for ALL devices on that chain or if not, that you make sure you dont have a conflict between a device thats set to "Master" (or slave) and one that is set to Cable Select (but is running as Master/slave) according to the '1', '2', '3' rule above.
Hope thats been useful
