Slave is Main HDD

[Michael Bilow]

Different brands of hard drives are not necessarily compatible with regard
to arbitrating the IDE bus.  This is because IDE is not a real standard
like SCSI, but really more of a de facto standard.

Generally, IDE drives have one jumper that decides whether it is master or
slave, usually labeled "M/S" or "C/D," and another jumper that decides
whether if the drive is a master it should look for a slave, usually
labeled "DSP" or "SP" (for "slave present").

By the way, Linux requires nothing except the Lilo MBR to be on the master
drive.  Once the Lilo MBR is loaded and running -- the thing that puts up
the inital boot prompt -- you can happily boot from the slave drive.  
Windows 9x, as Jerry said, must boot from the master drive.

-- Mike


On 2001-02-03 at 15:31 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> There should be a switch or jumper on both drives. Normally, you need to 
> switch on to master and the other to slave. Some drives have a setting for 
> "olny drive". I have found that on my system one of my older drives would 
> never operate as a slave behind another drive. At that time my solution was 
> to make that drive a master on the secondary channel.
> Once you make the jumper changes on both drives, you must go into your BIOS 
> and let the BIOS autodetect the drives.
> Remember that Windows98 wants to live on the C: drive. 
> Billy SG McCarthy wrote:
> > I've got 2 HDD in my computer, running RH6.2 on the
> > slave, and Win98 on the master.  For some reason my
> > computer refuses to allow the RH drive to be the
> > master (despite the fact that it's the newer drive,
> > and a new MB).  
> >  
> > I want to boot RH as my main OS and I'm unsure how to
> > deal with this situation.  


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