. > > Josef Lowder wrote: > > What is the correct way to connect four edi devices? > > I have an older computer that has a 20-gig hard drive, > > an older cd burner and a recent dvd player and I want > > to add an older 6.4-gig hard drive. > > > > The 20-gig hard drive is partitioned with win-xp and > > Xandros and the older 6.4 gig drive had an older version > > of redhat that I want to replace with pclinuxos. On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:06, KevinO answered: > Data can be moved faster from one IDE bus to another, rather than > between a master and a slave on the same IDE bus. If you have > concerns about throughput between the two hard drives, have them on > separate IDE buses. If you want to maximized throughput between the > CD burner and one of the hard drives, have them on separate IDE buses. > > I'm not a Windows expert but I think Windows expects to be on the > first hard drive, so probably primary-master. > > Other than the above, just have one master and one slave on each of > the IDE buses: primary and secondary. Keep in mind that a given IDE > bus will only run as fast as the slowest device on the bus. If you > put an ATA-33 Cdrom on a bus with an ATA-100 hard drive, the bus > speed will be 33. Thanks Kevin. Very helpful information ... but I still can't get it to work. In fact, now I can't even get it to boot from either CD drive, whereas it did before. I even tried setting the bios to see *only* the CD drive but it still won't boot from the CD no matter how I reconfigure the bios, and I've tried dozens of configs. This is how I have the drives connected. On bus ide-1 (the first bus) HD drive #1. Maxtor 20g primary master -- jumpers = [:]::.: HD drive #2. Western Digital AC26400 (6.4g) primary slave On bus ide-2 (the second bus) CD drive #3. Shuttle SDVD-121 C S M S L A : : [:] CD drive #4. CD-RW JustLink CD-Writer WRA-WA48 C S M S L A : [:] : On the 'net, I found this info: "Connecting DVD/CD drives, the cable is designed to host two devices on one IDE channel. Set the Master/Slave configuration jumper pins according to these pin labels: Cable Select (CS), Slave (SL), and Master (MA). In a second email, I'll write a further description of the problems I am seeing when I try to boot. --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss