Should a hard drive connect to the primary or secondary ports of a motherboard w

[tobi4422]

I have a gateway 2000 computer with no hard drive. I have a replacement drive but do bot know how to connect it. There are three slots on the motherboard. One is only for floppy drives. One of the others is labeled primary and the other is labeled secondary. Which one should I use for the hard drive?

 

[tomatthe]

It sounds like this is a fairly old machine, and most likely you are referring to ide connections. If there are no other drives on the machine which it sounds like there are not, connect the cable to the primary slot, and set the drive jumpers to Master or cable select.

This has some pretty good info on ide drives, and connecting them.

http://www.mikeshardware.com/howtos/howto_connect_ide_hd.html

 

[Hawkeye22]

Some drive have jumper settings for "single". If it does, use this instead of "master". If you use cable select, the hard drive will need to be on the end connector.