Member Avatar for kained

Okay. I have an old hard drive that needs restoring which needs to put into my computer as a slave drive, restored and then switched to master.

Am i right in thinking that all i need to do is chuck the toggle on my my primary drive from cs to master. Put the toggle on my second drive to slave. Plug secondery drive into the motherboards power, and then attach my secondery hardrive to the MSI cable that goes from the first harddrive into the motherboard via a breaker that says slave.

then once restored just swap all the slave/master stuff round?

err also any tricks in lineing up the cable that goes into the motherboard? i can't get it to fit.

it all seems to simple.

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Member Avatar for chrisbliss18

There are two cables involved in this process: the IDE cable (the one that connects the drives to the motherboard) and the powersupply cable (many people refer to these as a power molex or just molex).

If you want to explicitly set the master/slave settings, set the one to be master and the other to slave.

You can also use the CS setting on both drives. This is called Cable Select. If both drives are set to CS, the drive that is connected to the last connector on the IDE cable is the master and the one on the middle connector is the slave.

The IDE plug will only connect to the motherboard one way. If you cannot connect the plug to the motherboard, turn the plug around so that it faces the other direction and try again.

If you have a newer IDE cable, you can identify which plug is for what component by the plug's color. The blue plug connects to the motherboard, the grey plug connects to the slave (if your drives are set to CS), and the black plug connects to the master (if your drives are set to CS).

If your plugs aren't colored, you can identify the plugs by their distance from each other. The plug farthest away from the others connects to the motherboard, the middle plug connects to the slave (if your drives are set to CS), and the plug closest to the middle plug connects to the master (if your drives are set to CS).

Note that if your drives are explicitly set to master and slave, it doesn't matter which of the two drive plugs they are connected to. I always connect the master to the master plug and the slave to the slave plug no matter what the drives are set to just to keep things easy to remember.

Once you have the IDE cable properly connected, plug a power molex into each drive, connect any other peripherals you may have disconnected, close up the case, turn it on, and check to see that everything is working correctly.

Member Avatar for kained

cheers i managed to sort it.

One of the connectors on the IDE cable was sligly faulty and i ended up having to use some tweezers to get a bit of plasstic out of it. :rolleyes:

dave

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