[OT?] CD-ROM and Hard Drive on Same Cable

  • Thread starter Thread starter W. Watson
  • Start date Start date
W

W. Watson

I can't find a suitable PC hardware NG that looks current, so I'll post here
until someone directs me to a better NG.

It's been awhile since I played hook up with drives. Here's my problem. I
have a CD-ROM drive at the end of a cable. It works fine. I thought I'd
stick a HD in as a slave. It doesn't get detected. I made it a slave.
However, I have no idea what the CD-ROM thinks it is--Ah, master according
to BIOS. It looks like it has two jumpers. (What are the jumper
possibilities for it?) It's a 56x Disc shown in BIOS as G6D M1.30. I'm
pretty sure the cables are 48-pin. The HD is a boot disk from an older
system, and is in a removable drive (handle on front). It seems seated and
I'm pretty confident it's powered up, although the removable container has
no LED. (I switched power with the CD-ROM to test it.) Is it not possible to
put a HD on the same cable with a CD-ROM?

The CD-ROM is on the end of it's cable. The connector at the end of the
cable has one (center) pin missing, so I can't put the HD in it.

I could put the HD on the same cable with my W2K boot-up HD, but the cable
positioning is a little weird. I'd need to re-arrange the position of the
removable drive a bit.
 
It will work (assuming the jumpers are correct) but the controller can only
access one device (on a given channel) at a time so putting the cd-rom on
the same channel as a fixed disk is probably going to slow access to your
disk.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect
 
W. Watson said:
I can't find a suitable PC hardware NG that looks current, so I'll post
here until someone directs me to a better NG.

It's been awhile since I played hook up with drives. Here's my problem.
I have a CD-ROM drive at the end of a cable. It works fine. I thought
I'd stick a HD in as a slave. It doesn't get detected. I made it a
slave. However, I have no idea what the CD-ROM thinks it is--Ah, master
according to BIOS. It looks like it has two jumpers. (What are the
jumper possibilities for it?) It's a 56x Disc shown in BIOS as G6D
M1.30. I'm pretty sure the cables are 48-pin. The HD is a boot disk from
an older system, and is in a removable drive (handle on front). It seems
seated and I'm pretty confident it's powered up, although the removable
container has no LED. (I switched power with the CD-ROM to test it.) Is
it not possible to put a HD on the same cable with a CD-ROM?

The CD-ROM is on the end of it's cable. The connector at the end of the
cable has one (center) pin missing, so I can't put the HD in it.

I could put the HD on the same cable with my W2K boot-up HD, but the
cable positioning is a little weird. I'd need to re-arrange the position
of the removable drive a bit.
Click to expand...

It's better (though not essential) to have a boot up disk as an internal
hdd, with backup disks as external or internal drives. I presume from
what your saying that your disk controllers are IDE. The boot hdd should
certainly be able to be fitted into an IDE cable connector. The ribbon
cable connector has holes, not pins, and one central hole missing is
normal for an 80 pin cable connector. It will only fit one way.

The CDROM drive can be fitted on the same cable as the hdd, but that
should be a slave (middle connector) with the hdd drive fitted to the
end connector as a master. The other cable end must be attached to IDE
controller 0 (primary controller). It is better practice to fit the
CDROM drive on the other (secondary) cable ribbon as a master if no
other drive is attached.

Jumpering the hdd/CDROM depends on its make as this varies according to
manufacturer. If you look just above the jumper pins on the drives, it
often (but not always) shows which pins are designated for master, slave
etc in tiny initials.
 
Frank said:
It's better (though not essential) to have a boot up disk as an internal
hdd, with backup disks as external or internal drives. I presume from
what your saying that your disk controllers are IDE. The boot hdd should
certainly be able to be fitted into an IDE cable connector. The ribbon
cable connector has holes, not pins, and one central hole missing is
normal for an 80 pin cable connector. It will only fit one way.

The CDROM drive can be fitted on the same cable as the hdd, but that
should be a slave (middle connector) with the hdd drive fitted to the
end connector as a master. The other cable end must be attached to IDE
controller 0 (primary controller). It is better practice to fit the
CDROM drive on the other (secondary) cable ribbon as a master if no
other drive is attached.

Jumpering the hdd/CDROM depends on its make as this varies according to
manufacturer. If you look just above the jumper pins on the drives, it
often (but not always) shows which pins are designated for master, slave
etc in tiny initials.
Click to expand...

Yes, IDE. Effectively it is an internal HDD. It is cabled in to the middle
connector of the 48-pin cable on the secondary controller. The removable
drawer/try is pressed in all the way and seems to have the feel of being
plugged in at the back. I'm booting up off of the primary controller into
W2K. That works fine. However, I cannot see a HDD on the secondary
controller. Since BIOS is telling me the CD-ROM is master, I'll go with that.

It's too bad that there no LED on the Western Digital (WD) HD. BTW, it
contains data I want to extract. True it's a boot disk, but that's not its
function here. I just want to mount it and get the data on it.

My last resort is to move the WD into a slave position on the primary
controller. It's awkward mechanically, but that way I can be sure it's
really getting power.
 
Solved. After moving cables, etc. around, I forgot to put the jumper in the
correct spot. All is well.
 
Back
Top