I do a lot of jockeying with internal Hard Drives, slaving them as Secondary and so on and so forth. Is there ever going to be you think a single universal jumper setting for ALL IDE Hard Drives instead of the manic placements where some HD makers even change jumper positions on the same brands of HD's. For example: I have several Western Digital Drives, well depending on which series it is (arG!) the setting for plain MASTER is no little tiny plastic jumper, and then on some it's the first pair of pins next to the IDE harness. Seagate has their own specific positions, as does Hitachi (woowee ) and Maxtor of course. Those that are easiest i find to work with are the pin settings that normally are next to the IDE harness and serve as both MASTER & MASTER w/SLAVE. I wasted several hours trying to just slave up even the same brand HD to my main WD80 Primary only to get those refusal notices at boot up. I them go into the BIOS settings and have it reset to locate ALL HD's, it identifies them, but then on boot up it's a no go, just won't take. Well, done some Googling and Lo and Behold i'm not the only one who runs into these time wasting annoyances from these HD makers changing switches. Found out that some Western Digitals have a hernia if you even try to add a Slave onto the same IDE harness as that Primary Master, so had to yank off the IDE connector to my DVD in order to get the Slave/Secondary to become accessible on boot up. Shouldn't there or will there ever be a single standard for all Hard Drives to simply have the same positions or is this a something a user is going to always have to deal with when trying to pair up hard drives together on the same IDE wiring circuit. Sheez! Thanks All, and happy computing! LoL
