[Lewshu]

Hello new here and I have a question.
I have a 80GB Western Digital Hard Drive that came with my computer. I bought a 250GB WD Hard Drive, both did not come with jumpers. Is there a way to have both HD installed without jumpers, so I can have my 250GB as master and 80GB as slave?

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Yes, you can change the settings in the BIOS. Usually this is accessed by pressing the 'Del' key when your computer first boots. Bios settings are effectively 'virtual' physical jumpers.

[Spider-Man]

Yes, you can change the settings in the BIOS. Usually this is accessed by pressing the 'Del' key when your computer first boots. Bios settings are effectively 'virtual' physical jumpers.

[Samm]

Hi lewshu, welcome to G2G

I'm afraid that Spider-Man is incorrect when he says you can simply change the master/slave configuration in the bios.
The bios will autodetect the drives configuration & parameters, so if a hard drive has been jumpered as a slave (assuming it is on the correct connector on the IDE cable), then the bios will detect it as a slave & cannot override this.

With most Western Digital drives, no jumper means the drive is configured as a single (master) drive. Therefore you will need to jumper one or more of the drives in order to establish them as master & slave on the same cable. Alternatively, you could jumper both as CS (cable select) but this still requires jumpers!

NB Don't forget to place the master drive on the end connector on the ribbon cable & the slave drive on the middle connector.

[Lewshu]

Thanks for your help. I really didn't want to go buy a jumper.
So basically all I need is one jumper and set it as slave on one of my drives?

[austin_o]

If you look at the back of the hard drive next to where the EIDE ribbon cable connects, you will see two rows of 5 pins each. The "jumper: is a small plastic plug with metal contacts that is moved to the appropiate two pins for the desired setting. There should be a lable on the hard drive that identifies which pins are for master, slave, etc. Every hard drive I have ever seen always came with a jumper. All you have to do is move it to the correct pins and you are done!

. . . . .
. . . . .

pins look like this.

[Lewshu]

My hard drive is a SATA hard drive and I got it from newegg.com, and I was suprised it didn't come with a jumper, and my older hard drive came from Dell and it didn't have one either.

But I do have a friend who said he had a bunch of them.

So are all jumpers the same?

[dsenette]

uh...sata drives don't do jumpers...they detect master/slave kind of things on their own...in fact i don't think they actually do master/slave...you can (as was suggested in the beginning) choose the primary boot drive...but that shouldn't change when you add the new drive...as long as windows stays on the first drive

[Lewshu]

Yes I forgot to mention that in the beginning, very sorry about that.
I didn't know IDE and SATA hard drives were so different. Learning something new everyday.

Thank you for all your help. Next time I need help I will be more detailed. KUDOS to you!