Twin Hard Drives

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My motherboard has 4 IDE slots and I have two drives on the same cable, one master and one slave. When I separate the two onto separate cables and separate IDE slots, should I leave the jumpers as master and slave, or should the jumpers be both master, or something else?

(Last time I tried this, I screwed some stuff up, although I think it was from putting more than 1gig of ram in W98. Specifically, during multiple, multiple reboots into safe mode with the ram issue, I somehow lost the himem.sys file, but I do not think it was because of the hard drive cable issue).

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Each IDE slot should be able to provide for a master and a slave, so if you put each hd on it’s own channel, each would be the master device for that channel.

kip

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Just for my education, since I’ve never seen a motherboard with FOUR IDE “slots,” what’s the brand and model of that mobo?

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Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra

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Yeah, this seems to be a good mobo…most all of the upper end Soyos are easy to install and have lots of bios settings in place of jumpers. I am still using the RAID IDE as purely IDE, but the manual indicates that the RAID aspect could be quite nice to have.

I think my problems when separating the hard drives comes from a previous boot loader when I used to dual boot linux and windows because every time I split the drives into two cables, it just locks. When I put them back as master and slave whether on the primary IDE, secondary IDE, or on one of the RAID IDE, it boots fine.

I ordered a sliding aluminum mobile dock HD rack to install a third physical HD as a backup mech up top…looks mighty cool though I haven’t got another drive to put in it yet! Guess I might order two HD since the mobo RAID supports hot swappable.

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Thanks to you and Cowboy, Mike, for the “tech ed.” That’s what I get for being retired – I’m fast getting technically obsolete. I had never seen a mobo capable of 8 IDE devices, I guess because I never got to do anything with RAID when I was still working – the network techs always did that kinda stuff. So, how ’bout your original question? Did it work out OK when you reset the HDD jumpers? By the way, if I read it right on that web page, it said this mobo doesn’t support USB 2. I wonder why they did that? Thanks for the sidelight info, guys!

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I never could get it to work Al, with the drives on separate cables. No matter what I do, system locks. Almost certain it is the way I have W98 configured though…swap file on one partition, linux boot loader, etc. At this point, I am just leaving it alone! It works like it is! As far as the USB 2.0, I wondered that myself.

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