Please Help Me Install My Drives

D

Doctor Varney

New Member
I have three drives to install into my system but I don't know how to jumper them and I don't understand what the term 'cable select' means or if it is applicable. Please can you help?

The first drive is already formatted. It's a Western Digital SATA 40GB which contains my operating system (Win XP Home) and DTP programs. This will be the first master.

The second drive is a Maxtor 40GB and is the old type (not SATA) <edit: IDE> and I want this as a storage drive for backing up the files I write to my main drive in case anything happens to them. This will be the slave.

The third drive is a Maxtor 320GB SATA. I want to format this one with Windows again and run my music software on it. This will be the second master.

What do I have to do in order to make them work in this configuration?

Thanks

Dr. V
 
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Not sure how to do it with SATA, it's in the BIOS I'm pretty sure however.
As for the IDE drive, what is the model number so we can look up pin configurations?
 
Thanks. I don't know, I will have to switch off and get inside to find out. The WD SATA which is the main drive did not come with any jumpers or instructions and it works completely un-jumpered. I got some jumpers from the shop I buy all my 2nd hand gear from. The Maxtor IDE 40GB drive says on the back "No jumper = DS Slave". So I don't understand why the other one works as a master. Are they actually different from make to make?

Also - why, when the old IDE drive is connected, does it make a bleeping sound while the system is booting? It sounds like some kind of alarm. I don't know what this means. Any ideas?

Dr. V
 
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Doctor Varney said:
Thanks. I don't know, I will have to switch off and get inside to find out. The WD SATA which is the main drive did not come with any jumpers or instructions and it works completely un-jumpered. I got some jumpers from the shop I buy my gear from. The Maxtor IDE 40GB drive says on the back "No jumper = DS Slave". So I don't understand why the other one works as a master. Are they actually different from make to make?

Dr. V
Click to expand...

SATA doesn't use jumpers, that's all I know about it, as I never had a SATA drive.
So, look in your BIOS for a configuration page for SATA and see what you can do. It may be an ID-based setup, however.
As for the IDE drive, you can't set one IDE drive as slave, there has to be two of them for one to be set as slave.
 
Oh. I thought I once had a SATA and an IDE together. So are you saying they can't mix?

SATAs must use jumpers because on the back are the little pins for them.

Okay then - I can still do this without the back-up drive (IDE) and use the other SATA as a (secondary?) master.

What's 'cable select'?

Dr. V
 
Doctor Varney said:
Oh. I thought I once had a SATA and an IDE together. So are you saying they can't mix?

SATAs must use jumpers because on the back are the little pins for them.

Okay then - I can still do this without the back-up drive (IDE) and use the other SATA as a (secondary?) master.

What's 'cable select'?

Dr. V
Click to expand...

Cable select automatically makes the IDE drive either slave or master depending on the connector of the cable, like, say I put the IDE drive on the last connector, and added another to the second connector, I would have the one on the last connector automatically as master while the second one would be slave. Cable select is basically the easy way to configure your drive.

Pins, eh? Well read up on how to change the ID on your SATA drive, it will vary on make and model. But that IDE drive will end up being the master on it's channel.
I think if you assign the proper IDs to the SATA drives, there may be an option in the BIOS to make the SATA drives act as IDEs and then you might be able to change the master in there. But I'm not sure :o
 
Oh, this is no good. I will have to take it into the shop and get them to do it. I don't know how to maintain a PC. Damn! Might as well have bought a Mac! LOL!

Dr. V
 
You have 2 SATA drives and 1 IDE drive. SATA doesn't have master/slave settings. Set the IDE drive jumper to master and attach it to the end of the IDE cable. That SATA drives and the IDE drive can be enabled in the bios for what drive to be booted to, its called boot devices in the bios.
 
Sorry, that probably wasn't helpful... LOL! I'm just brassed off.

It's an ATI which is all I can tell you at the moment. I'm running the AMD Athon 4000+ 64 processor.

Apparently, I have 1GB of RAM. Which is funny, because I'm sure I put two 1GB sticks in there!

Dr. V
 
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