Correct jumper setting for IDE Drives while using a SATA HDD for booting?

[Jofe]

I was looking into my dad's PC, which is old by the way, because the DVD drive disappeared from Windows, you can place a disc and it won't show anything. Anyway, I opened the PC and found out that the DVD drive isn't the only thing connected to IDE. Turns out there's also an old HDD that windows wasn't seeing either. Problem is that I don't remember what the jumper settings should be. Both drives were set as slave, but I have this odd feeling that the HDD should be set to master (or at least one of them should be set as master). As it should be obvious, Windows boots from the SATA HDD, so no issue on that part.

Thanks for any help that you can give me.

[MrPaladinGuy]

There should be pictures or words somewhere on the drive that indicate which setup is needed for slave or master.

IIRC the HDD with Windows on it should be master (not needed in this situation), but yes they both can't be set as the same and function.

It wouldn't take long to get them all working just by trial and error anyways.

[Jofe]

Well, gonna set the IDE HDD as master and see what happens.

[Aurimas]

What Pally said is right. One slave and one master if on the same chain, and you could probabaly just play around a bit until they work.

Better yet, throw them out and buy SATA. That's what I did.

I know it seems stupid to spend $30 dollars for a DVD (plus whatever for the size HD you want) just to not screw around with jumpers... until one day you realize that you lost the jumper because "master" meant to take the jumper off. Now your hard drive is a coaster until you wait for a ten cent piece of plastic with a paper clip in it to arrive from whereever you finally found that sells them.

Plus those IDE cables are so damn hard to navigate and they block airflow like nothing else.

So peronsally, I'd trash and forget about the HDD (you already have, since you were not using it and forgot you had it). Then I'd spend 20 or 30 dollars to replace the dvd with a SATA version and never look back.

Edit: IIRC, they were very forgiving if you only had one item on the chain, so you could probably just pull the HD and the DVD would work in almost any jumper config.

[Jofe]

I know it seems stupid to spend $30 dollars for a DVD (plus whatever for the size HD you want) just to not screw around with jumpers... until one day you realize that you lost the jumper because "master" meant to take the jumper off. Now your hard drive is a coaster until you wait for a ten cent piece of plastic with a paper clip in it to arrive from whereever you finally found that sells them.

lol, well it's not my PC so not really my choice, probably would be the best, but still. He has some old work on that HDD and even though I copied all those files into a new HDD he still wants it in there.
Anyway, setting the DVD drive to master and the HDD to slave seems to have worked. Only small issue is that I had to set the boot order to use the SATA HDD first, but nothing else.

Thank you for the help.