To Slave or Not to Slave

This is a manually set designation done on an IDe hard drive that tells the computer system whether the drive is the boot drive or primary or secondary. This is vital for it tells your CPU where the boot drive is that contains the Operating system(usually windows). This can be determined with a quick check on the label of the drive where the pin designations are shown.

Setting this, you take a look at the IDE hard drive(preferably when it is still not installed on the computer system) in between the IDE cable and the power supply. There are normally three pairs of pins, one for master another for secondary or slave and the last one is for auto-detect with the computer system determining on it’s own which is which.

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