BIOS Instructions
 

Hi,

My Master IDE 0 has is my hdd and my dvd is allso Master on IDE 1 but i think it should be a slave to avoid conflicts but i cant figure out how i do it. Should i worry?

Slave is set by a jumper on the back of your drives. I always set mine to cable select and then it is determined by the BIOS settings (SATA) or the connector used (IDE).

One of each without worry...

If you have only one HDD and one disk drive, you can set each of them as a Master on its own controller or set the HDD as Master and the drive as Slave on one controller. There should be no difference in performance you can notice.

It might be better practice to place the jumpers on the respective Master and Slave settings rather than to rely on their cable connection placement to determine their status.

On a PATA cable, Master is the end connection, Slave the middle, and the connection farthest from the middle connection goes to the motherboard. On some motherboards, the first and second IDE connectors are designated by a difference in color.

Well when you get into IDE and performance, and IDE channel always operates at a maximum speed of the slowest device connected. So if you have a HDD and an Optical drive connected, you are limiting the HDD performance because the IDE channel is limited to the speed of the optical drive.

I'm sure that you remember these details:

An IDE or EIDE or PATA controller supports two drives -- master and slave.

Older systems typically have a primary and secondary EIDE controller.
Some

With both PATA and SATA controllers in the same system, PATA usually gets considered first.

Linux sees PATA devices as /dev/hd[a-z] and SATA devices as /dev/sd[a-z].

WinXX boots from "the first drive on the first controller".

In my own practice, I put my best CD/DVD drive on a different controller from my most important HDD. This way read media uses one controller channel and the corresponding write disk uses another controller channel. Likewise read disk and write media also use distinct controller channels. With two PATA controllers I do this:

• PATA-1, primary drive = boot or system HDD
• PATA-1, secondary drive = alternate CD/DVD
• PATA-2, primary drive = best CD/DVD
• PATA-2, secondary drive = alternate HDD

The above is pretty olde school. Adding SATA to the mix changes things because it must allow for how the BIOS recognizes the mix of controllers and drives.

On win-doze your mileage will vary.
~~~ 0;-Dan