I Can't set my Hard Drive as Primary Master?

[loseyaself]

I had an older computer given to me it is an Intel Celeron 267 MHZ with 128 MB ram award bios not sure of the mobo. It did not have a cdrom or hard drive in it so I purchased a 52x LG CD-RW and a Maxtor 40 GB Hard Drive. I left the jumpers the way they were factory(master) I installed the IDE Cables>>The Hard Drive into the Primary and the CD-RW into the secondary. I wanted to make my Hard Drive Primary Master. So after hooking everything up I start up the pc and when it is detecting Primary master it just sits there on that and says press f4 to skip in brackets. I have gone into the Bios and made sure it was set to auto detect. So after hours of messing with that still nothing. So i tried changing the jumper on the Hard Drive to slave actually I tried them all and the only way I can make it work is by putting the jumper on Cap Limit on the Hard Drive? So i did that and now when it loads up it says Detecting

IDE Primary Master = None
IDE Primary Slave = My Maxtor Hard Drive
IDE Seconday Master = MY LG CD-RW
IDE Secondary Slave = None

OK so i loaded a boot disk and fdisked set primary partition formatted c: loaded win xp seems to work
So is it ok to leave my hard drive as primary slave? Or how would i make my hard drive the primary master? whats the difference?
ALso now that windows will load up with these settings I look at my hard drive properties and came to find out that my 40 Gig Hard drive is only showing a capacity of 31.4 Gig? Is this because it is not set as primary Master..? Sorry for the dumb questions but could someone please try and help me out?
Thanks in advance

 

[cdogg]

That is strange. Are you sure you had the jumper correctly set as Master the first time you hooked it up? If so, then try removing the jumper altogether which should default as Master.

If that doesn't do it, at least it'll be fine to leave it that way just as long as you don't plan on adding another IDE device to the primary channel anytime soon.


~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind";
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[loseyaself]

nope i wont be adding anything else to this so it is fine to leave the jumper off of this Hard drive ? ok so now that i have win xp all loaded up and updated when i do this is it gonna make my hard drive to primary master and will i lose everything and have to reformat? And you wouldnt happen to know why my 40 gig HD is only showing 31.4 gig.. any explanation for that?

 

[loseyaself]

oh yeah so i leave my cd-rw on the secondary channel what jumper should that be on master/slave/cs..probably slave right?

thanks

 

[cdogg]

I think the biggest point to make is that there is no real difference between MASTER and SLAVE. Each only signifies the position of the device to the BIOS and does not have any bearing on performance. They might as well be called RED and BLUE.

Now the only exception is if you had two hard drives on the same channel. In that case, the BIOS would look for an operating system on the MASTER drive first, before scanning the SLAVE drive. That's it - only the order at boot makes any difference. Also flip flopping the settings around won't hurt a thing. The contents of the drive will still remain intact. No need to worry about losing data or reformatting.

As for your CD-RW drive, same thing goes. The setting doesn't matter.


~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind";
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[oisnds]

Question:
And you wouldnt happen to know why my 40 gig HD is only showing 31.4 gig.. any explanation for that?

Answer:
So i tried changing the jumper on the Hard Drive to slave actually I tried them all and the only way I can make it work is by putting the jumper on Cap Limit on the Hard Drive?

The Cap limit is to allow the drive to work with older systems that only support up to 32 gig drives.

 

[cdogg]

Yeah, that's a good point. If your system is a bit outdated PII, AMD K6-2, or earlier CPU, chances are that you have an older BIOS that doesn't support large drives over 32GB. For that, you'd want to visit your motherboard manufacturer's website for BIOS updates. Perhaps there is a revision that allows your system to see more than 32GB.


~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind";
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884