Need QUICK help connecting my hard drives and cd rom; slave/master

[vlatko]

ok i have had some troubles with booting cause my hard drives were mixed up. os i unplugged 2 drived and left just one that i'm installing windows on.

i'm not into these things much so bare with my possible mistakes.

right now i have the following connected like this, i'm reading from my bios:

ide channel 3 master: wd250js ---> wester digital sata 250gb disk, partitioned on one of 50gb which has windows on it and other 200gb which has stuff like music on it.
ide channel 2 master: pioneer dvd-rw ---> my pioneer dvd/rw

is this ok? and can i leave it at that? cuz it works for now.

i am now going to plug in another disk(120gb) which is empty. the only thing i can connect it to is ide channel 1 slave. all of my cables are mixed up and i can only get this cable to this hard disk. is this ok?

next one more disk, non sata, 20gb blank seagate, i can only connect it to ide channel 2 slave, once again cause the cables are all mixed up. is that ok?

so afterwards it will look like this:
ide channel 3 master: wd250js ---> wester digital sata 250gb disk, partitioned on one of 50gb which has windows on it and other 200gb which has stuff like music on it.
ide channel 2 master: pioneer dvd-rw ---> my pioneer dvd/rw
ide channel 1 slave: empty 120gb ide hard disk
ide channel 2 slave: empty 20gb ide hard disk

can those settings work? will windows still want to boot after i connect these two drives? i really don't get this slave/master things so help me out if you can.

thanks

 

[Nodsu]

I'm pretty sure Windows will fail to boot after you connect an IDE hard drive. The problem being that IDE are enumerated before SATA. Windows thinks that is on hd0, then suddenly it wakes up as being run off hd2. It won't boot.

Install Windows with everything connected.

No idea if you can fix existing Windows with anything but a repair install..

 

[vlatko]

I'm pretty sure Windows will fail to boot after you connect an IDE hard drive. The problem being that IDE are enumerated before SATA. Windows thinks that is on hd0, then suddenly it wakes up as being run off hd2. It won't boot.

Install Windows with everything connected.

No idea if you can fix existing Windows with anything but a repair install..

i just made a fresh install on my sata disk. the other two drives were disconnested. install was succesfull. i then added the second disk and via bootable cd i formatted it. i restarted the pc and windows booted with the new drive recognized and in my computer, ready for work. i connected the third disk and formatted it as well, restarted and windows recognized it again.

i think my problems before were due to the fact one ide disk had the boot record on it, but windows was installed on a different disk, the sata disk. if that make any sense...