How to connect four edi devices?

[Josef Lowder]

.
> > 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.