How to make SATA HDD as master and slave

[Bharathwaj]

Hi,
I have 2 SATA Hard drives. In one of my Hard drive, boot sector went bad. So I will not be able to boot boot into my computer using that hard drive. I bought another SATA hard drive. I have some important data on my old hard drive. I want to know how to make my old hard drive as slave and my new hard drive as master. When I connect new hard drive and old hard dive to my computer, old hard drive is not detected. I even checked in checked in BIOS. After booting the computer I also checked in device manager, my old doesn't show up. I also checked fro the jumper in my hard drive. Jumper is not there in both of my hard drive. I'm sure that only boot sector is gone bad in my old hard drive because I'm getting that message on the screen. Can some one help me turning hard drive master and slave.

Info: brand name of Old hard drive is Hitachi. New hard drive is seagate.

Thanks in advance.

 

[SNGX1275]

There is no master/slave with SATA drives.

You control which one boots by the boot order in the BIOS. If your drive isn't showing up something is seriously wrong with the drive. Based on what you have said, I suspect that your drive has died and that error is only displaying because a boot sector won't be found on a dead drive. But before all hope is lost...

I'd try connecting it to a different SATA port on the motherboard, sometimes there are more than 1 controller (SATA I, SATA II, or a RAID) and I suppose there is a tiny chance you had a controller go bad. Not likely though, esp if you plugged the new drive into the same controller and it shows up.

Jumpers on SATA drives were used in the past (on some drives) to force a legacy mode if the drive was SATA II and your motherboard could only handle SATA I.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Another possibility is that a few SATA ports may be disabled if they are set to IDE mode.

Wikipedia Link - Serial ATA

At the device level, SATA and PATA (Parallel AT Attachment) devices remain completely incompatible—they cannot be interconnected. At the application level, SATA devices can be specified to look and act like PATA devices.[29] Many motherboards offer a "legacy mode" option, which makes SATA drives appear to the OS like PATA drives on a standard controller. This eases OS installation by not requiring a specific driver to be loaded during setup but sacrifices support for some features of SATA and, in general, disables some of the boards' PATA or SATA ports, since the standard PATA controller interface supports only 4 drives. (Often which ports are disabled is configurable.)

 

[Bharathwaj]

Thanks for your reply. I will try that and let you know.

 

[Joe Lunchpail]

Hey there: I too wanted to simply add an old IDE HDD I had laying around just for storage. I checked all over the 'Net and all I found was a bunch of people who need a life & who tried to dazzle me with BS or baffle me with their brilliance. I already had a pretty good idea about how to do it but I like checking. I have 1 SATA & 1 IDE port on my board. That's it! SATA is my boot drive (C & my DVD is Master on the IDE(0)-End plug. Here's what I did & it's easy-peasy!
1: Leave jumper alone on DVD/CD
2: take jumper off of the IDE HD and put it somewhere that you're sure to forget about
3: Plug the IDE HD into the connection in middle of ribbon cable (don't forget the power!)
4: Boot computer & go into BIOS>BOOT Make sure the SATA is the 1st to boot with the HDs (My sequence is: DVD, USB, SATA, IDE{because it'll never make it that far in the booting}
5: Save your new settings
6: Enjoy (after Windows installs the new driver for the IDE HD & asks you to reboot)
7: I repeat.... ENJOY your newfound storage space. It took me all of 10 minutes after laughing my head off for 2 hours reading all the gobbley-gook all over the Internet. Too many people just have to complicate things. Like accountants. It's not even math... It's arithmetic!

 

[SNGX1275]

Hey there: I too wanted to simply add an old IDE HDD I had laying around just for storage. I checked all over the 'Net and all I found was a bunch of people who need a life & who tried to dazzle me with BS or baffle me with their brilliance. I already had a pretty good idea about how to do it but I like checking. I have 1 SATA & 1 IDE port on my board. That's it! SATA is my boot drive (C & my DVD is Master on the IDE(0)-End plug. Here's what I did & it's easy-peasy!
1: Leave jumper alone on DVD/CD
2: take jumper off of the IDE HD and put it somewhere that you're sure to forget about
3: Plug the IDE HD into the connection in middle of ribbon cable (don't forget the power!)
4: Boot computer & go into BIOS>BOOT Make sure the SATA is the 1st to boot with the HDs (My sequence is: DVD, USB, SATA, IDE{because it'll never make it that far in the booting}
5: Save your new settings
6: Enjoy (after Windows installs the new driver for the IDE HD & asks you to reboot)
7: I repeat.... ENJOY your newfound storage space. It took me all of 10 minutes after laughing my head off for 2 hours reading all the gobbley-gook all over the Internet. Too many people just have to complicate things. Like accountants. It's not even math... It's arithmetic!

Apologies for bumping this again after a month and a half, but hey its not as bad as bumping it after 5.5 years...
Joe Lunchpail - I don't know your background or age and it is dangerous to make assumptions, so my apologies if I'm totally wrong here. But there reason there is so much "gobbley-gook" is because IDE stuff is confusing to people that didn't "grow up" with it. Really the ONLY sure fire way to make IDE work even on IDE only boards (pre SATA) was to force Master and Slave jumpers correctly. There seemed to be various ways boards dealt with Cable Select (CS) and incorrectly jumpered drives. So as a result you get people that post what worked for them, but the problem with that is while it probably did work for them, they often didn't give any details on what the exact hardware/chipsets were that they were running. So yes, there was a lot of confusion and a lot of people didn't want to screw with jumpers so things were difficult - the only real way was to jumper appropriately and skip cable select all together. What further complicated things was once you hit ATA-66 you needed 80 wire cables vs 40, those ribbons were fragile and easy to get connection problems in them if they got bent too much. So that added another complication in troubleshooting things.

The tl;dr of this is: glad you got it sorted - however just because you figured it out quickly doesn't mean all the stuff you read is any different than what you just posted.

Disclaimer: it has been almost 20 years since I knew these things and I didn't know them incredibly clearly then, the computing world and standard were still very raw back then, so what I said above may not be 100% correct.