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turn a slave drive into a master

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by evansm26

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I have had a master and a slave drive for about a year now. They were both functioning fine, until recently. There seems to be a problem with the master drive. It is very small so I have decided to use just the slave drive as a master and eliminate the other all together. I have saved the info on the slave drive to an external drive and ran the software that came with it to make it a boot drive, which deleted all the info from it. I am now trying to install Windows XP to the slave as it has no OS. This is not working. Also, since I have moved all the cords around so many times back and forth, I cannot seem to even set up the computer again to boot with both drives attached as they were in the beginning. I did it once and can't figure it out again. I seem to have made a mess and would appreciate any help you can offer.

3 replies

by older mycroft

I'm assuming you have 2 3.5 inch IDE drives.

Each drive has a set of pins at the rear, along with some 'jumpers' and a diagram on the top or bottom or rear of the drive.

The diagram will illustrate which placement you use with the jumper(s) to make the drive a Master or a Slave.

Depending on the age/design of your particular machine, you may also have the option to set both drives to 'Cable Select' : that way both drives are set to the same jumper position and the computer figures out the relationship of each drive relative to the other.

I advise you check the illustration for the master setting and apply that to the drive you wish to keep in situ.

by tintoman

"This is not working"
Frankly a statement like that isn't a great help in resolving your problem, so I assume that you mean you have not been able to install windows on the drive.
When you check the jumper settings as previously advised you must set them to either CS or Master, then connect the drive to the END of the IDE cable.
Then when you start the machine, you can enter the system CMOS settings usually by pressing the delete or F2 key on your keyboard while the boot screen is visible.
There you should see your hard drive listed as the primary master, if so you can proceed and boot from your installation cd.
Note:
If this is by any chance a Dell machine your jumper settings must be set to cable select

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