Member Avatar for melliniumman

hey people in conjuction with my last post about my computer would pluggin in my hardrive as the slave drive work in tryin to boot up , if so how would i do that

thanks again

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Short answer for : whether a drive will boot does not depend on an arbitrary "slave" label alone. It depends on the interface (PATA/IDE vs SATA), the drive's jumper/cable settings on older systems, and the BIOS/UEFI boot order plus the presence of a bootable OS and an active partition on the disk.

If the machine uses PATA/IDE, set the drive jumpers per the drive label (or use Cable Select correctly) and connect the drive to the appropriate ribbon connector. A quick way to test is to disconnect any other drives, move the target drive to the primary channel, then enter BIOS and set it first in the boot order. For SATA systems there is no master/slave — each drive is independent and the BIOS/UEFI chooses a device by port and boot priority.

Troubleshooting tips: check power and data cables, confirm the partition is marked active, try booting from rescue media to verify the OS, and swap the drive onto a known-good controller if available. Do not worry about “damaging” the PC by powering on with a drive set as slave; the real risks are static discharge and incorrect jumper placement — always follow the drive manufacturer’s jumper diagram. was right to point toward checking jumpers, and ’s reminder that BIOS can boot other devices (CD/DVD, USB) is useful when isolating the problem.

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Member Avatar for ect76

If you're trying to set your only hard drive as slave then I don't think so - As far as I know (And feel free to correct me if you find it's not the case!) the drive you're booting from has to be the master. For info on setting jumpers check out this website.

http://www.mysuperpc.com/hdu/jumper_pins.shtml

Good luck!
Ewan.

Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

You can boot from any bootable drive -- master, slave, CD, or DVD, and in some cases even the A and B floppy drives. But the first hard drive installed is always the master driver. All other non-removable hard drives are slave drives. You might damage your computer if you turn it on with only a slave drive.

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