Alright so I installed my hard drive, 80GB Western Digital (if it matters). I had some trouble at first because I wasn't aware that you can only have 4 or less IDE things going on at the same time...

 

So I took out the CD-RW drive and put the new hard drive in.

 

And it works

 

But I want the CD burner instead of the plain CD drive (read only)

 

When I try to hook up the CD burner again the hard drive doesn't show up at all, its not recognized by the system in windows or anything

 

But when I put the read only CD drive in everything is fine

 

Whats going on?

Set the hard drive jumper (little piece on the pins on the back next to the power) as a master and the CD burner jumper as the slave. Diagrams should be on the top of the drives so you know where everything should be.

Set the hard drive jumper (little piece on the pins on the back next to the power) as a master and the CD burner jumper as the slave. Diagrams should be on the top of the drives so you know where everything should be.

If set up correctly...

 

Can I have all of these set up at the same time:

 

2 Hard drives

CD (read only)

CD-RW

Floppy

 

?

Floppy isn't going to interfere with this. You can have 4 IDE devices at once as long as your Power Supply can handle it. The floppy is on it's own connection.

 

You can have 2 Hard Drives, and 2 CD Drives. I'd try it this way:

 

Cable 1:

CD-Rom - Master

CD Burner - Slave

 

Cable 2:

Main Hard Drive with OS - Master

Secondary Hard Drive - Slave

Set the hard drive jumper (little piece on the pins on the back next to the power) as a master and the CD burner jumper as the slave. Diagrams should be on the top of the drives so you know where everything should be.

Don't hate dood. I unfortunately have been inside 3 different chassis in the last week doing this exact stuff. I had 4 hard drives in 1 machine a few times this week.

color me impressed.

 

 

 

i was doing this on dozens of machines a day a couple years ago.

of course you can also have an OS on your slave hard drive also if you are so inclined.

of course you can also have an OS on your slave hard drive also if you are so inclined.

Yes, I'm just giving him an option of what I'd do.

of course you can also have an OS on your slave hard drive also if you are so inclined.

Yes, I'm just giving him an option of what I'd do. well naturally.

 

 

he could always be like me and have an old worthless OS on the slave drive.

Thanks doods

 

Everything is fixed

If set up correctly...

 

Can I have all of these set up at the same time:

 

2 Hard drives

CD (read only)

CD-RW

Floppy

 

?

If you intend to do burning, its desirable to have the burner and HDD you'd be burning from on different channels:

 

ex:

 

80G Primary master

whatever Primary slave

CDRW Secondary master

whatever Secondary slave

 

On any given IDE cable, only one device can be accessed and issued commands at a time. Splitting the source drive and target burner onto different channels allows the machine to read from the HDD at the same time its issuing writes to the burner rather than lockstep serializing the whole operation. The net result of such a split should be fewer coasters burned. Hmm

 

Actually I was planning on burning from the 80 gig and they are running on the same cable...

 

I'll go switch things up and put the hard drives on the same cable

 

But then copying from hard drive to hard drive becomes...slower?

I'm gonna go try this

 

First - 80 gig master, cd (read only) slave

second - smaller hard drive master, cd burner slave

 

actually..

 

Would it be better to run both hard drives on the same cable to make burning from each hard drive to the cd burner quicker...

 

or

 

would it be better to have smaller hard drive and cd burner running together with the 80 gig on other cable so that copying from hard drive to hard drive becomes smoother?