harddisk problem and ide

[rookie1010]

Hi
I wanted to know if my hard disk is sick?

it was working on the secondary ide controller as a master, it is a WD 160 ATA 100(think it is the most famous HD on this forum )
last night the computer just turned itself off(at least i think it did), and the red light for the hard disk was on. i switched teh hard drice to the primary ide connector and it worked fine. the primary ide also has the cd as a primary slave.
and i checked the hard drive for jumper settings, it turned out that teh jumper was set for master with slave. and there was no slave on that connector. have not seen it in the previous hard drives i have had. but it had been working before, i wonder why it stopped working on the conenctor today and is still working on the other connector.

 

[n_derr]

put the hdd on the primary IDE as a single drive and leave the cd-rom on the secondary IDE. they should never be on the same channel

 

[rookie1010]

why should not the hard drive and the cd rom be on the same channel?

 

[HoLoCroN]

Technically, you can put any type of IDE device on any IDE channel as a master or a slave.

For performance purposes AND as an unwritten rule, you usually put the hard drive on your Primery IDE Channel as the Master. This is the first spot your POST test will go to when inspecting your IDE setup and you would like your hard drive to pass first.

Also, if you have two devices on one channel the "Master" takes priority over the slave. You really don't want your computer to devote more resources to running a CD-ROM and your hard drive.

The one thing to keep in mind is, due to limitations with IDE, the devices really do not work at the same time, the IDE channel staggers between the Master and Slave, in other words, you can't read from a CD-ROM AND write to the hard drive at the exact same time. The reason you might not notice this is because the computer cycles through this process fast enough, so you wont notice any slow down.

Due to this, it is industry practice to put the hard drive on the primery IDE Channel as Master and the CD-Rom on the Secondary IDE Channel as Master.

If you have more than one hard drive, you can attach it as a slave to either IDE Channel 1 or 2. Since it is not your primery drive that houses your OS, you won't notice any degredation in system performance.

 

[rookie1010]

what about this configuration
primary slave:cd rom
secondary master:hard drive

this would save me of removing devices, changing jumper settings.

 

[rookie1010]

i just put in the following configuration and all of a sudden everything went so slow
it seemed to freeze after detecting the ide stuff. so i put everything back to normal
the configuration was
primary master :hard disk
secondary slave : cd rom

any ideas why it upset everything else