IDE Device 0 or 1, Master or Slave 1

[sigm]

I recently had a hard drive go bad and replaced it. Everything was OK until I had to add another HD. The orig HD's jumpers were already set to Master, the second HD I set to slave. I connected the IDE cable with the Master at the end and the slave in the middle connection. Upon rebooting the master was assigned the e: and the slave was assigned the c:, why? Does it matter where I attach the master and slave on the ide cable?

 

[franklin97355]

Try it the other way and see. XP will assign drive letters any way it wants and you need to go out and tell it what you wanted.

 

[dakota81]

Right - Windows XP does not care what position the drives are on the cable, and will keep the same letters associated with the drives even if you switch around the physical configuration.

 

[sigm]

That is why I'm confused. The OS is 2000, but the orig HD was c:, and after I added the second HD and made it the slave, the System came back up with the slave as c: and the master as e:, the cdrom was d:. Any ideas?

 

[bcastner]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q825668

 

[sigm]

I'm not too sure this applies. The orig HD already had win2000 installed. Taken from the above link, "This is a change from the behavior in Windows 2000. When you install Windows 2000 on computer that uses the same hard disk configuration, Windows 2000 Setup tends to assign the logical drive C to the hard disk that is configured as master on the primary IDE channel." So according to MS, the master should have been C: and the slave should have been E:, correct?

 

[RichardMoran]

Just a thought, but was the second HD a new one, or had it previously been used in a PC?

The only time I've experienced this sort of issue was when the second HD had previously been used as a master. It could be that one of the partitions on it is still set as being the active primary partition. ( I apologise if I'm using the wrong terminology, but it's been a while, and I don't have Partition Magic with me! )

I would check the partitions on the second HD with a suitable utility to see how they are set up.

Rik

 

[bcastner]

The only thing that matters is what Windows version is being used to enumerate the PnP device. (You could have a blank drive, or a previous LINUX drive, or a Win2k drive).

As a clean install using Win2k, the article suggests that there is something wrong with either your jumper setting, or the cable connection.

Check that your older or new drive (particularly if Western Digital) does not require an additional jumper for a second drive in a two-drive configuration.

For IDE devices you have nowadays a choice between the traditional Master/Slave, or Cable Select. Cable Select is the most often seen on newer motherboards, controllers and attached hard disks. But you cannot mix them. As a guess, even if set to "Master" the new drive needs to be set to cable select, as well as the newer drive you are adding. And with a Cable Select type of cable, you need to be sure drive 1 is at the very end, and drive 2 on the middle of cable connector.

 

[sysadminguru]

I think the OS finds the HD that has MBR and assignes drive letter C:\

 

[bcastner]

The OS finds the Active Partition of all defined partitions on all devices.

 

[sysadminguru]

I use the software that came with my HDD and when I format my drives using this software it asks me if this drive will be a data drive or a boot drive.
in saying this it could be that the way the drives are being formated could be the cause.

if this is useless then go to MMC and and change the drive letters under disk managment to your liking.