BIOS won't Make Primary HDD

kazica

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Aug 27, 2012
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After adding another SATA HDD and installing windows 8 in it. I changed the Jumper setting In PATA HDD to Slave but windows didn't detected it. So I Unplugged the SATA HDD and tried to use the PATA HDD, coz it had some important files which I wanted to copy to USB Drive. But BIOS detected my PATA HDD as third master only even though the jumper setting was configured to Master Drive. DVD RW jumper setting is in slave.

How can I run that PATA HDD to access my files. Windows 7 is installed on it.
 
Solution
You should never have changed the PATA jumper. "Master" and "Slave" are settings that relate ONLY to the ONE IDE channel a unit is connected to. There is NO such thing as a "Master" drive of the entire machine. There IS a BOOT drive, and other data drives, but NO Master.

I assume you had (and still have) two IDE devices on one IDE port, sharing one 80-conductor ribbon cable. Here is how they should be set up:
1. ONE device MUST be the Master (by its jumper setting). IF you have two devices on this cable, AND IF the jumper setting diagram shows a difference between "Master only" and "Master with Slave Present", set it to the "with Slave present" version. This Master device really should be plugged into the END (Black) connector of the...

ram1009

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Try unplugging everything but your PATA HDD and set the jumpers for "MASTER or ONLY". Some MB are sensitive to the position of slave & master on the PATA cable so check your manual. The BIOS should than detect only one PATA drive and should boot into it as previously.
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
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You should never have changed the PATA jumper. "Master" and "Slave" are settings that relate ONLY to the ONE IDE channel a unit is connected to. There is NO such thing as a "Master" drive of the entire machine. There IS a BOOT drive, and other data drives, but NO Master.

I assume you had (and still have) two IDE devices on one IDE port, sharing one 80-conductor ribbon cable. Here is how they should be set up:
1. ONE device MUST be the Master (by its jumper setting). IF you have two devices on this cable, AND IF the jumper setting diagram shows a difference between "Master only" and "Master with Slave Present", set it to the "with Slave present" version. This Master device really should be plugged into the END (Black) connector of the cable. (The Blue connector on the other end is in the mobo port socket.)
2. The SECOND device MUST have its jumper set to Slave. It should be plugged into the MIDDLE connector (Grey) of the cable.
3. IF the two devices are one HDD and one optical drive, usually it is advised that the HDD should be the Master, and Optical as Slave. I think you had yours that way.

NOTE that this is how you set up two IDE devices that SHARE one port and data ribbon cable. This is NOT what you do if you connect each IDE device to a separate mobo port. In that latter case, each device would have to be set to be the Master of its port.

There are no jumpers to set on a SATA device (well, at least you should not change them unless you know how and why). There is no Master or Slave setting for any SATA device. Moreover, adding or removing SATA devices has NO effect on how you set the jumpers on your IDE devices.

You MIGHT have to check one other thing when you have both IDE devices installed plus your new SATA HDD. In that situation, some mobo BIOS's will default to assuming you want to boot from the SATA unit, and I assume you do NOT want this. I'm assuming the original PATA HDD is your boot drive, and the new SATA unit is just for data. So, once you've reset your jumpers you can boot into BIOS Setup and check that all units are detected properly. Then go to the Boot Priority Sequence setting. Make sure it is set to boot from your old PATA unit (maybe from the optical first, then PATA HDD?) and that the SATA unit is NOT in the boot sequence anywhere. Save and Exit and it should boot fine.
 
Solution