multiple master/slave

There's something that is not quite working right in my configuration for my drives. Can someone help me out with a quick tutorial please, so that I can figure out what I'm forgetting to do?

I've now got two harddrives and two cd rom drives. I can't seem to get the computer to recognize all of them at once. It will only recognize two at a time, and if I have more than that plugged in, it takes forever to boot.

I did have the slave/master jumpers defined, but it didn't help.

I have my mian hard drive as master and slave, the secondary hard drive as slave, and one cd as master, one as slave.

If I have the hard drive on master only it doesnt work, it needs to be master and slave at the same time.

Hope this helps.

Mxx

Typically as a rule, the more important should be master EG. Primary HDD and CDRW or DVD.

Eg. IDE 0 should be HDD Master CD Slave
IDE 1 - CDRW Master Whatever else slave (eg another hdd)

Thanks guys. I'm pretty sure that's how I had it defined. But before I open it up again to double check, exchange things, and replug, does cable order matter?

Originally posted by abbylee
does cable order matter?

Nope.

On some hard drives it requires more than one jumper to set it to master or slave. Make sure you got it all correct. And I know on some Western Digital hard drives if it is the only device on the ribbon cable, you have to take all the jumpers off.

Originally posted by abbylee
Thanks guys. I'm pretty sure that's how I had it defined. But before I open it up again to double check, exchange things, and replug, does cable order matter?

In some cases the cable order DOES matter. One of the options on most drives is the "CS" or Cable-Select option, if your drives were set to use Cable-select initially unless you changed cables the cable will affect your settings.

If your cable is labeled "Master" and "Slave" then you can be pretty sure it's a Cable-Select type cable. If that's the case you can either make sure your drives are jumpered "CS" and hooked to the cable properly or swap to a different cable that doesn't use the Cable-select option.

make both harddrives master. one on each drive. Read each harddrive to see where jumpers go. then put both cd roms as slave one on each hd. and that should work

For preformance reasons what Snake said will be the ideal setup. IDE can only access one drive at a time PER CHANNEL therefore if you were to transfer data between primary master to secondary master it would be faster then between primary master and primary slave.

yes but I am not quite sure about this..shouldnt it matter if both drives are ata100 or ata133? All i kno is my friend got a cd burner..and he couldnt have it on the same cable as his hard drive because his computer was old and the cable / hard drive were built for ata100.

Originally posted by Ankun
yes but I am not quite sure about this..shouldnt it matter if both drives are ata100 or ata133? All i kno is my friend got a cd burner..and he couldnt have it on the same cable as his hard drive because his computer was old and the cable / hard drive were built for ata100.

As far as I know it doesn't matter. If it doesn't work try a controller card for whatever slot that your computer can handle. I still don't think it will matter it will just slow down the other hardrive when that one acesses it.