Despite knowing this I managed to salvage two internal hard-drives from some unwanted PCs at my school, not even sure they work! Seeing as I only have 32 meg of free space its about time I got down and dirty with it in the hope that these will do the job.
Right - here's the issue - I have these two hard-drives. On one the lable says it does have a jumper BUT next to it is "Master - ON, Slave - OFF" The other, which is MUCH older judging by the exposed PCB and poor spec, has no jumper info at all. Thats all the info I really have on them...
What I want to know is how the whole Master/Slave thing works. As far as I am aware you can set it via the IDE cable but that may only be on newer machines, this is from 2001. Is the whole jumper thing gonna make this a big no-go? If it does work how arduous is the configuration process? I am told very! I always assumed there was a nice, easy switch on the disk itself and then the good old OS would take over, alas I was wrong.
If this were to be a no go I was wondering if there would be anything stopping me buying an enclosure and using one of these externally
System spec:
Late 2001
900MHz Processor
128KB Cache
256 PC100 168 pin RAM (from 128)
20GB HDD - pretty much full
Running XP
The info I have on the two hard-drives
1 - "Caviar 22100 AT compatible intelligent drive" (the older one)
Parameters - 4092 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors
2 - Newer of the two, claiming to not support slave operation
Parameters - 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors
Jumper - J50
Master/Single - On
Slave - Off
My own knowledge
Know my stuff with general use and taking Computing at A-Level so I do know my stuff. Hardware knowledge is limited, don't really like to get down with it for fear of breaking something and having to live PC-less!
Apreciate any help, sorry to be a bit thick on the hardware side of things
Edited by Wheathampstead Brko, 18 August 2007 - 06:03 AM.