Category: Geeks r Us
Hi and sorry for the vague title.
For the most part i'm fine with hardware. I'll get a sited person to fit a cpu if there around, but if there not I can just about do it ok, i'm just paranoid about bending pins.
But I have a question:
I'm finding more and more hat the drives master / slave orders are messed up. Because of this, machines won't boot from cd and sometimes coz the hdd isn't primary, xp will crash after the first reboot in setup, so i'm wondering:
1: Most boards will have 2+ ide connecters on them, obveously ones gonna be labeled as primary. Is there any way of telling this myself in the same way that for example, the first slot that the board checks for ram is always the nearist to the cpu?
2: Some of the newer cables for ide drives have stuff like cable select. I've been reading about this and it would seem that so long as I only have one drive in the system then I can use cable select and it'll jumper it automaticly so I don't have to bother with primary and secondary. However, most computers are going to have more than one ide device really aren't they. So, is there any way of telling which end of the cables go into the board and which end goes into the drive? I kno that the ends of the cables are color coded, so they must mean something, and also that there is usually one connecter, short cable, another connecter and long cable, so is there any way of telling which end goes where based on this?
Idealy i'd just get sata drives, but all the mobo's I have to play with don't support sata so its kinda out of the question unless I get a pci card.
Any hints would be great, I also think it would be interesting if this turned into a topic that was just generally about blind people and building machines.
Chears, BEN.