I'm apparently searching in all the wrong directions, so I'm back to bother you fine folks once again. This is about running both IDE & SATA drives on a motherboard that IS equipped for both. I DO have the empty IDE slot. I would like to add a second optical drive (CD) to my computer so I can reduce the wear and tear on my DVD LightScribe. Also, my DVD drive is significantly slower than the CD drives and it would speed up some of my old CD games loading. I want to use one of the many spare IDE CD drives I have laying around. My primary concerns are the jumper and drive lettering and the great unknowns. Should I set the "new" IDE drive jumper to Master, Slave, or Cable Select for the IDE drive if I have another drive installed under SATA? I have no personal preference that I can think of, so I'm only concerned with the system and ease of installation. How is this going to affect my drive lettering? Will it adjust automatically? Currently I have: A: 1 Floppy 1 HDD with 2 partitions C: & X: plus D: DVD Burner w/LightScribe E: Phantom CD (Virtual Drive) F: - I: Card Reader Are there any likely problems I might come across? System: Custom Mainboard : BIOSTAR Group N61PB-M2S w/4 GB DDR2 RAM (Corsair) Processor: AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7MHz x1Core Processor DVD: Sony Optiarc iHAS224 SATA DVD Burner w/LightScribe Windows XP SP3 w/NET Frameworks 1-4 - all updates installed Thanks for any assistance you can lend in simplifying this probably already simple procedure. -- -There are some who call me... Jim "Facts are the enemy of truth." - Don Quixote - "Man of La Mancha"
Rather than make this complicated, we can work step by step. We could start by pretending the IDE cable is independent of everything else. Since you already have a hard drive connected and it is working, I see no reason to assume the second connector is going to misbehave. The hard part, was getting the first drive to work. The second one should be easy. The hard drive will either be jumpered right now, as Master, or as Cable Select. If the hard drive was a Western Digital brand, it supports "Master alone" and "Master with slave" modes. Since you're moving to a two drive config, then "Master with slave" would be the flavor of jumpering to use on a Western Digital IDE hard drive. "Master alone" or words to that effect, are for when only one drive is present on the cable, and the middle connector is empty. If one drive is Master (the drive down the end, all by itself), then your new CDROM will go on the middle connector as Slave. If one drive is Cable Select (again, down at the end, as down at the end is where the first drive populated is supposed to go), then your new CDROM will go on the middle connector as Cable Select. Ribbon cables come in two flavors. One with "fat" wires and a total count on the ribbon of 40 wires. The second kind uses "thin" wires and a total count on the ribbon of 80 wires. The 80 wire cable supports Cable Select mode, while the 40 wire cable typically doesn't. Since your hard drive is working, you've undoubtedly done the right thing already. If not, and the cable is 40 wires wide, then you'd use Master/Slave jumpering, instead of CS/CS jumpering. If the position of the drives, requires moving the hard drive from the end connector to the middle connector, the Master/Slave flavor doesn't need to be altered. With two drives, you can either do them Master/Slave or Slave/Master, but when only one drive is present, it's Master and goes on the end connector. Obviously, an 80 wire cable and "Cable Select" for everything, is a lot simpler to explain Cable up, test, and come back... With this many combinations, it's almost easier to just tell you to not make both of them Master HTH, Paul
Paul snuck on to your hard drive to scribble: Thanks Paul I missed your response earlier and just got to it. I'm going to work on the comp this weekend so I'll let you know how it goes. -- -There are some who call me... Jim "Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
