IDE drives use a hierarchy on the IDE
ribbon cable which is determined by the small plastic
jumper on the back of devices connected on the cable.
If you look closely at the drives, you'll see that there
are three options for IDE settings.
The first is Master. When a drive
is set to Master, this indicates that it will take
precedence over any other drives on the cable.
Slave indicates the drive is second.
Cable Select means that the drives are
setup so that their position of the cable itself dictate
if that drive is Master or Slave.
Now, there are also at least two IDE
cables. The motherboard will have a place for the
Primary and the Secondary IDE cable. These are
often Primary (IDE0) and Secondary (IDE1).
The hard drive your system boots to
should be Primary Master. A CD/RW will normally be
Secondary Master. Then you can feed slaves from
both of those.
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