What jumper settings for added drive?

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macx

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I built this desktop but it's been about 3 years and I haven't worked with jumper settings since, so please bear with me.

ASUS P4C800-E Del board.

WD wd800jb C drive, of course jumpered to Master

I went into Setup and found my CD is listed as Second Master
(It is on a separate cable that hooks to the board in a separate
socket from the C drive cable.)

My existing wd2500jd (SATA) is shown as Third Master (jumpers on
the far right set of pins)

I'm trying to add another wd2500jd SATA drive, but the computer won't recognize it.
It's currently jumpered to the same, far right set of pins (per WD, that's "Master" )

I've tried doing some research but could find nothing conclusive I could understand.

I've got the drive I'm trying to add correctly cabled as far as I can tell.

On the board, there are two SATA sockets.
So far I've tried hooking the drive I'm trying to add to the second SATA socket
in the pair where my existing sd2500jd drive is connected.
It feels like it is running, but the computer can't recognize it, even with
restarting.

I tried connecting my existing SATA drive (E) to the other SATA socket
and then when I checked Setup it showed that drive as 4th Master instead
of Third Master , so both SATA sockets are apparently "Master" connections.
When I did that I had the new drive hooked into the SATA socket where my E drive
originally was (and where the E drive showed up as Third Master) but the computer
still can't find the new drive.

I've run the WD Lifeguard Tools drive installation program and it
can't find the 3rd drive either, and it doesn't show up in Device Mgr.

Don't know if this is any help, but my Device Mgr shows the C drive
& the CD under "IDE Host Controller" and the existing E drive under
"Mass Storage Controller" - but it doesn't show the new drive anywhere
- I would think it should show up as a 2nd drive under "Mass Storage
Controller"?

The new drive is brand new, I bought it at the same time I bought my
existing E drive but never needed the capacity till now so hadn't hooked
it up before.

Thanks!!
 
The first hard drive (80GB) and the CD drive are jumpered correctly. If you only have one device connected to each of the two IDE controllers on the motherboard, each may be set to master or cable select (if supported by mobo). For SATA drives it is not necessary to change any jumper settings from the original default positions for desktop applications. One SATA drive per motherboard SATA connector. Master and slave does not really apply to SATA drives (hard drives or optical drives).

Of course, before you can use the newest SATA hard drive, it must be formatted first. Go to Disk Management and see if it is recognized there. If so, go ahead and format it from there and then you should be good to go. This is Windows XP, correct?

To get to Disk Management: Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management.
 
From what I read on the WD install instructions on the Lifeguard Tools CD, that CD was supposed to format the drive.

But I checked Disk Mgmnt and only my 2 existing drives show up.

As a last resort I'll try swapping the SATA cables between the 2 drives in case i've got
a bad cable. I'll post back if that helped or not.
 
Swapped SATA cables and the WD Tools found the drive right away.

Proves it pays to check even the obvious simple stuff.

Thanks for your efforts!

Well, wasn't that exactly.

What it seems to boil down to is that neither the computer nor the WD setup would recognize the new drive as long as the existing E drive was hooked up - maybe because the two drives are identical models?

I unhooked the existing E drive, restarted, and then the WD setup found the new drive and installed it. Then when I restarted and hooked the existing E drive back up, the computer now recognizes both of them and they both open under diff drive designations.

So, live and learn. All is well that ends well.

Thanks again!
 
That is an interesting issue on how you got it resolved.

But just to reiterate what was said above, the SATA drives are always going to be masters because they don't have the ability to chain together like IDE or SCSI or USB or Firewire. 1 drive per connection. The jumpers on the back of the SATA drives are almost certainly there to drop it to SATA I speeds (150MB/sec) incase you have an early SATA controller that doesn't like SATA II drives (300MB/sec).

So really you shouldn't have to touch the jumpers on those at all unless you know your SATA controller is incompatible with SATA II.

If you are dealing with booting from SATA drives (which you aren't it seems), you still don't mess with master/slave anything, you just set the boot priority in the BIOS.
 
Please note: Cable Select (CS) has now been preferred on all ATA (IDE connected) dives for many years.
Sata is automatically configured to Master (M) as it has its own single connection
 
When I originally built the computer, I had thoroughly read the ASUS setup instructions and apparently found that both drives would be considered as Masters once I hooked up the 2nd drive. Of course, being several years ago and don't regularly work with these issues, I had forgotten all that.

It was probly a quirk because the 2 drives happened to be identical.


Yes, I'm not booting from a SATA drive. And in Setup everything is reported as you describe it, with both SATA drives being Masters.

Thanks for enlightening me on this info. Maybe having worked thru it, I'll remember it a little better for when I do my next capacity upgrade.

When I built it, if I recall correctly 250gb was pretty much at the top of the heap.
but I was surprised at how fast I filled up the one - home video took a big chunk of course.
 
Imagine when 20Gig was noted as massive :haha:
Everyone wondered why a 40Gig drive was made, a little overkill you think :p (maybe at the time ;) )
Mind you the didn't seem to break as easy back then
 
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