Guide to Building A Computer v2.0


Step6: Drive Preperation


You will have to setup and prepare your drives before installing them into the case and attaching the appropriate cables to them. There are jumpers on the back of all IDE devices determining their status in the drive chain. The jumpers have three or more positions that they can be set at by the movement of a plastic tab that selects the device as a Master, Slave or Cable select drive.

The hard drive should always be set as a Master device if you are using a single hard drive in your system configuration and it should have no drives other than another of the same type of hard drive slaved off of it as the drive chain defaults to the slowest speed drive in the chain.

If you are using a hard drive that is a brand new out of the box product its default setting is nine times out of ten as a Master or Cable select device so you shouldn't have to adjust the jumpers as this will enable the device to get detected automatically by the system.

The CD /DVD should also be set as a Master device with your ZIP drive or CDRW device slaved to it. If using a CD writer over 8X it is best to use an additional controller card to get the maximum benefits from your device as higher speed drives require their own IDE channel to function properly and without buffer errors.



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