harddrive change

mystified1 · n00b Joined: 04 Oct 2009 Posts: 16

My primary hard drive just died but I have a slave hard drive that I used for backup in case something happened. I removed the primary and used those cables for the slave drive which is now the primary. I am installing Debian because I only backed up Gentoo because that is the only distro I want to use. The problem is that it still sees it as a slave drive and can't get Debian to install. What am I missing?

Thanks

durian · Guru Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 312 Location: Margretetorp

You mean it is seen as a slave drive in the BIOS? Are they IDE drives? Then maybe you have to change the jumpers on the back of the drive, to change it from slave to master so the BIOS gets it right.

-peter

mystified1 · n00b Joined: 04 Oct 2009 Posts: 16

From looking at BIOS I don't know what I need to change.

fangorn · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 1886

There are two kinds of (consumer) harddisks Serial ATA (small cables who tended to fall off easily at first) and Parallel ATA (a wide and a 4-wired cable which are hard to plug in).

From your description I would say you had two Parallel ATA discs. These use a Master/Slave scheme that is mostly hardcoded at the harddisk. So you will have to remove the harddisk from the case and look between the two plugs. There is a jumper field. Somewhere on the disk should be a table where the settings are described. Your disk should be set to Slave and you have to change this to Master. After you put the harddisk back into the case it should work.
_________________
Video Encoding scripts collection | Project page

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 4:39 pm Post subject:

I don't recall SATA disks having master/slave jumpers. They're pretty much autodetect depending on which port it's plugged into. I don't have experience with port multipliers however.

Not so for PATA/Parallel.

There are two kinds of cables, one is a "cable select" cable where one of the pins is disconnected (pretty much all 80-conductor PATA cables). The straight through is the other type. If your hard drive is jumperred as 'slave' it will always operate as slave no matter which cable or connector it's hooked up to. However if your hard drive is jumperred as 'CS' it will be master or slave, depending on which connector on the "cable select" cable. Jumperring "CS" on a straight through cable will have undefined (it may or may not work, could be master or slave) results...

Ahhh this is post 1337....
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

mystified1 · n00b Joined: 04 Oct 2009 Posts: 16

Thanks, I found out about the master slave earlier. It's been so long since I installed a hard drive that I didn't even look until I bought another back up disk.