Help with primary or slave?

A

Anatascia

New Member
Hello everyone
I am hoping that someone knowledgable can answer my question, but it will have to be in simple terms because when it comes to computers, I am simple.
When I first got my computer 2 months ago, a friend was here to load on the OS and all of my programs, but we could not get the computer going. He took the case off and found that the hard drive (Western Digital 200Gb) was set as primary according to the 'jumper pins', whatever they are, and said it should be set to slave, which he did do, but he said the hard drive was indeed faulty.
I took it back to the store and it was faulty and they replaced it, but the technician said that he noticed that the other hard drive had been set as slave and he has set the new one back to primary and it should be left there. When my friend came over to do the set up again, I told him what the technician said and he said rubbish! and went ahead and changed it again.
Could someone please tell me which way is the correct way, and if my setting is wrong, what sort of affect would that have on my computer.
Thank you so much
A.
 
Is that a WD SATA or ide drive? If you are running a pair of ide drives with the new on the end of the cable it would generally be set as master. But in a few cases where a drive won't boot try the cable select position for both. The boot order in the bios itself also determines which drive will load the OS.

The three things for ide drives are (1) position on cable(master/slave). (2) a jumper setting, and (3) the boot order in the system bios. The store tech will have checked #3 already. If the new drive is a SATA along with an ide hd the ide will load by default in most cases. I have a friend borrowing an older hd until he gets his WD 200gb SATA drive running. If the drives are both ide and on different cables the poistion on the secondary cable will matter however as far as master or slave settings.
 
I have just the one HD and it is not a SATA as I remember my friend being disappointed when they replaced it. The one that was faulty was a SATA
 
Just to make sure I understand the situation, you have 2 (or more) hard drives? And the drives are not SATA correct?
 
Thank you Cromewell
What affect would it be having on my computer seeing as though the one hard drive has been set to slave?
 
It wont hurt anything. For most systems each PATA channel (when at least 1 drive is connected) needs a master drive.
 
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