Master vs. Slave

[JeffPr]

My computer came with a hard drive, the primary master naturally. I bought a new hard drive and plugged it into the slave plug and set the jumper to slave. My question is if I switch the jumper on my first hard drive to slave the second jumper to master, do I have to switch the plugs around as well? Also, what is the difference between primary master and primary slave, dual master etc? Too many jumper options on the back of my hard drives gets me confused.

I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it. ~ Erwin Schrodinger talking about quantum mechanics

 

[edfair]

If you have a cable marked master, slave, and system, you have a cable built for cable select. That is all it means.
Your hard drive jumper selected as master can go in either place and the new hard drive, if it is jumpered as slave, can go in either place. The only place you would make a change would be if you were to select either one of the drives as cable select and plug it into the slave position on the cable you would need to jumper the other drive as cable select and plug it into the master position. And running it as a single drive C/S requires it to be on the end , master.
So no, you wouldn't have to sweat the cabling.
One of the drives has to be master to let the other know when it is OK to transfer data.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[018331751]

I have just set up a new hard drive on my computer, the old one had standard 3 jumper spaces set to master (*-*) the new has 4, how do i set as a master, as in how do i jumper if it is set as (*__*),
Also I booted from win 2000 boot disk, it formatted the new drive and installed Windows 2000 ( to the best of my knowledge) but when it restarts it says "insert bootable media" what do i do? Is it something to do with the jumper settings?

 

[edfair]

Don't know what you have or what the jumper config really should be.
You can go to the manufacturer's web site and look at a picture of the controller and find what the jumpers are. I suspect that the 4th set have to do with testing coming out of the factory, but I don't know.
Your 2K may have seen it as a slave and just formatted or done one of the many other things that keep them from booting. Ties in to the bios settings , too.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.