Can't set up master/slave drives

[jefuchs]

I just built my own system ad it worked great from the start. But I the decided to add a smaller hard drive and use it as the boot drive. The larger drive will just be for files, downloads, etc. So I bought an 80GB drive for the boot drive.

So now I'm learning that the old master/slave setup I'm accustomed to is a thing of the past. I went to the manufacturer's website and can't find any info about setting up a two-drive system. On IDE drives, I just had to have the jumpers in the right place, but apparently that's an obsolete method. Unfortunately, I can't find info on the new method... even from the mfgr.

I tried just installing an OS (Ubuntu), but it only recognized the smaller drive, and didn't seem to find the larger one.

So what's the deal with SATA and slave/master?

[Lerxt]

There is no such thing as slave/master in SATA. If your MOBO has SATA connectors, you should have a primary and secondary. There is no need to set any jumpers on most SATA drives, outside of some specific setting changes that relate to how your MOBO handles drive (default settings, i.e. no jumpers, should work most of the time).

I put a SATA drive into my old Dell system with 4 IDE drives. It became the primary boot drive (the MOBO appears to favour SATA over IDE) with the existing older drives (two HDD's in a M/S setup and two optical drives, same setup).

So, if you have IDE mixed with SATA, the IDE drives would have to be setup in a master/slave relationship, as long as you had two IDEs on the same IDE controller.

In your case, it looks like you have one IDE and one SATA drive. You need to configure the IDE to be only drive on that controller, and I presume if you only had one drive then there is no change. If you swapped out an old IDE drive that was part of a pair of HDD's then you need to remove the jumpers on the remaining drive (my understanding is that if there is no M/S relationship then you don't need a jumper set) and install your SATA on the primary SATA controller.

It's just that simple.

[Jamie Nixx]

SATA has no concept of master/slave.

Lerxt cheers for clearing that up.

[jefuchs]

That's it! My mobo has six SATA sockets. All I needed to do is plug the boot drive into socket #1 and it became the "master."

The mobo manual didn't explain that either.

Thanks.

[Lerxt]

Six sockets? Ahh, methinks I need to invest in a new MOBO...

[Amosmoses33]

You could plug it into any of the sockets, I dont think it matters with sata