Hello msfn...i havent been here for a long time now so thought i would come here to get help for my little problem...since the experts live here

i have purchased a hdd which is 80gb and also i have purchased a dvd-rw drive.

i previously have a hard drive and cd-rw.

i am wanting to install both new parts and keep the old ones.

how do i set the jumpers..as slaves on both the new drives?

thanks

A bit more detail would help. are they SATA or PATA (old style IDE) drives. If SATA there is no master slave setting needed. if PATA (old style IDE) then i assume you know how to physicly change between the two and go for a setting like this old hdd as primary master, new dvd-r as priamry slave, new hdd as secondarey master and old cd-r as seconday slave.

this is on the basis that you will keep your opperating system on the old hdd and will be mostly recording to the dvd-r from the new hdd

yes the hdd is old style ide. and yes i will be using the new dvd as the main writer and keep the os on the old hdd, so the way you have described above is the way to make the setup yes?

thanks for you reply

i would do it that way on the basis that PATA is not good when you have 2 devices actively transfering data at the same time on the same cable. hence i would recomend putting data on to the new hdd before buring it to dvd. also this has the advantage when doing disk to disk cd copys.

aha thanks. the motherboard has a fdd port, and 2 ide ports however i need to connect two hard-drives and the dvd-rw...im gonna forget hooking up the unreliable cd-rw?

how would i connect the 3 appliances when there are only two ide ports?

Edited May 8, 200620 yr by Wasim

can anyone help?

If i were you i'd install them like this:

IDE1:

HDD1 - Master, SO hdd

HDD2 - Slave, backup, data or anything you'd like

IDE2:

CD-RW

DVD-RW

From what i understood from SecretNinja, he's telling you to install like this:

IDE1:

HDD - Master, SO hdd

DVD-RW - Slave

IDE2:

HDD - Master, data

CD-RW - Slave

I suppose that the newer HDD is better than the current, so i'll also transfer SO from the old HDD to the newer HDD.

SecretNinja's "way" is a good way to avoid your Windows to get all laggy while transfering files from HDD1 to HDD2.

Edited May 8, 200620 yr by sk3

but how do you connect three ide drives (2x HDD and 1x dvd-rw) if there is only two ide connections on the motherboard?

You don't. Each IDE Channel alows you to have up to 2 drives. If you ONLY have 2xHDD, 1x DVD-RW and 1xCD-RW that makes a total of 4 drives. You have 2 IDE Channels so, on each channel you connect 2 drives. Of course you need to have an IDE cable capable of connecting 2 drives.

lol yes but would you connect a 2nd ide cable to the ist ide cable to share the ide channel?

Yes i would because it's the only way to attach all the drives

Now you choose the order of the drives.

I prefer HDD on the same channel (1st IDE channel), and opticals on another channel (2nd channel).

If you don't transfer a lot of data across the HDD's there's no problem by putting them together on the same channel