Now I have inserted two more hard drives on to my computer.
However, there are problems. On one IDE channel, I have connected
my CD-ROM drive, and three hard drives.

I had one 200GB drive. Recently I inserted a 500GB Western Digital
drive. I changed the jumper of the 500GB to slave.
Today I inserted the third hard drive as slave. It is 160GB IDE drive.


A person told me it is incorrect to have more than two drives one IDE
channel. Is it true?
The problem is that the system doesn't recognize the third IDE hard drive.

Primary Master -- 200GB IDE Samsung drive.
Secondary Master -- ATAPI CD ROM Drive
Secondary Slave -- 500GB IDE Western Digital drive

The system doesn't recognize the third hard drive. It is 160GB IDE
hard drive from Western Digital.For the time being I just disconnected
the electricity cable to 160GB drive.
Now the computer works smoothly.

I have open SUSE on the Primary Master.
I have Fedora 7 on Secondary Slave.

How can I solve this problem? I must have all the three drives on my
computer.

On one IDE channel you can only connect 2 devices, since the IDE cables only have 2 device connectors. The first is Master, the second is Slave. Older computers have more IDE channels (2 or more), so you can connect up to 4 IDE devices.

Your 160 GB disc should be Primary Slave according to this table. That should work. Connect the 160G HDD to your first IDE channel, where your 200G Samsung is, and don't forget to jumper it to slave.

Apart from Master and slave you can go for the "cable select" option.

When every disk and Cd drive are "cable select" the device attached to the end plug is automatically a master while the one to the middle plug is a slave. You never need to touch the jumper setting again.

All my 30+ hdd are "cable select".

200GB IDE drive is primary master. It is Samsung drive.
I had it for almost two years.

You want me connect 160GB Western Digital hard drive on the same cable. This means one IDE channel

Then two hard drives and a CD ROM drive should connect to the other cable. This means the second IDE channel.
Does the second IDE channel support 3 drives?

OH! I am sorry. I have made a mistake. There is one hard drive and one CD-ROM. So it should support 2 drives.

Now it is too late. I must sleep now. I will try tomorrow.

I think it is 2 devices per channel--no matter what they are.

but cable select---does that allow more than 2 per channel? If so, you need special cables?

You are limited to 2 devices per channel, and 2 channels per system. Your BIOS won't permit any more.

There are 3rd party cards which have their own drivers which will allow you to have more IDE channels on one system; you will have to go with one of those if you want more IDE drives.

I have never used any of those 3rd party cards (I always have used SCSI historically and in the future may be using eSATA as well) so I can't offer any recommendations. But this is the route you have to take if you want more IDE on one system.

The cable select only automatically arranges master and slave according the plugging locations. I have never seen one IDE cable stringing 3 devices.

the bottom line is each IDE channel can only support 2 drives(HD or CD) So, if you have 2 IDE channels than you can have up to 4 drives(HD or CD). Gins, are you sure you have IDE HD not SATA HD?

There are mobos with four channels, traditionaly they are in servers, but nothing says you can't use them in/as a personal computer. Like the Abit KR7A-RAID:
And I also use cable select on the computers that support it, not all do, some older ones refuse to boot due to missing drives using cable select. Could have something to do with the fact that parallel ATA was not around yet when they were built and only had a 40 wire cable.

Thanks everybody for valuable comments.
What is cable select?
How do I find it?

I have never heard of it.

Cable select means the drive becomes master or slave depending on where it is on the cable. If it's at the end (usually black connector), it becomes the master and if it's in the middle (grey connector), it becomes slave. There's usually a jumper on the back of the drive which you can use to select master, slave or cable select.

Junior Hacker ,

Older disks do not support cable select. They have to be pretty old though, say less than 10Gb in capacity.

The UDMA 133 needs 80-wire IDE cable. Apparently the extra 40 conductors are just there for earthing stability purpuse.

I have not had a server mobo that offer 4 IDE connectors to support 8 IDE devices but I could imagine that could be available. These hardware may have a problem with a Linux/Unix system because the 256 devices names from Pata disks are made up by 4 disks each with 64 devices names (one for hda and then 63 partitions from hda1 to hda63). The 8 IDE devices can potentially break the 256 devices names of Linux/Unix convention.

Actually, I've tried installing drives with the cable select jumper enabled (drives that had that capability) in older machines. The bios of those machines did not recognize these jumper settings.
The early AT Attached drives (ATA) only had one type of head that did two jobs, it was a read/write head. In time, developers came up with dual heads, one for reading and one for writing, which allowed for parallel data transfer as the drive could be read from and written to at the same time sharing processor cycles along with other running processes. This is where the name changed from ATA, to PATA, (Parallel AT Attachment), and the 80 wire cable came into play.

Junior Hacker ,

You could be right. I just read it off the Internet. I do not have the technical knowledge to challenge their claims.

Curiously wikipedia has this to say

I am aware that not all information in the Interent is accurate but the claim of the "additional" wires over the 40-wire format are just used for grounding purpose has appeared in various articles.

I found three holes on the motherboard to connect devices.

I tinkered with the cables to solve the problem.

1. One cable just connects to the floppy drive.

2 One cable connects the one hard drive and the CD-ROM.

3. One cable connects two hard drives.
[ I have three hard drives.]

The following is the way the system recognizes drives:

Primary IDE --- Master [200GB Samsung]
Secondary IDE --- Slave [160GB Maxtor ]
Secondary IDE --- Master [CD-ROM]
Secondary IDE --- Slave [Western Digital]

Is the above fine? Please tell me.

Now the system recognizes all the drives
and functions smoothly.
I created two primary partitions on the Maxtor drive to install Solaris and Free BSD. The partitons hdb1 and hdb2 are primary partitions.

Because both Solaris and Free BSD need primary partitions. Do you think I will be in trouble to install Solaris and Free BSD?


{The partitions hda5, hda6, hda7 and hda8 for the open SUSE. I installed Fedora 7 on hdd5 and hdd6. I hope to install Mandriva, Debian, Slackware on hdd7-12 partitions.}

linux-3vxw:/home/Niss # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 5874 47182873+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

/dev/hda2 5875 24321 148175527+ 5 Extended

/dev/hda5 5875 9138 26218048+ 83 Linux

/dev/hda6 9139 12402 26218048+ 83 Linux

/dev/hda7 12403 12794 3148708+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

/dev/hda8 12795 23891 89136621 83 Linux


Disk /dev/hdb: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 9791 78646176 83 Linux

/dev/hdb2 9792 19929 81433485 83 Linux


Disk /dev/hdd: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdd1 1 60801 488384001 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdd5 * 1 3921 31495369+ 83 Linux

/dev/hdd6 3922 15021 89160718+ 83 Linux

/dev/hdd7 15022 18941 31487368+ 83 Linux

/dev/hdd8 18942 30046 89200881 83 Linux

/dev/hdd9 30047 33971 31527531 83 Linux

/dev/hdd10 33972 45071 89160718+ 83 Linux

/dev/hdd11 45072 48991 31487368+ 83 Linux

/dev/hdd12 48992 60100 89233011 83 Linux
linux-3vxw:/home/Niss #