Originally posted by Sailor Saturn:
<STRONG>I'll have a computer with a P4 1.5Ghz processor, 384MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, and 64MB video card.</STRONG>
You do realise that you will not be able to use the memory that is in your current machine in your new machine, right? (I am assuming that you have an Intel P2 or AMD K6-2 based system; you did say it was three years old or so). The Pentium and K6 processors use the standard PC100/133 DIMM (Dual Inline Memory Module). The P4 uses RDRAM mounted on a RIMM (Rambus Inline Memory Module). The two are not compatible. However, the RIMM chip is much more efficient and runs at a higher clock speed, so having "only" 128 MB of RDRAM is preferable to having 256 MB of PC133 SDRAM. You should be able to strip everything else out of your old computer and use it in the new one.
<STRONG>
Could you explain this in more detail, please? </STRONG>
I am going to assume that you want to know more about the IDE Master and IDE Slave functions. This is the long version, so forgive me for not being brief.
When your computer boots, the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is going to load from the motherboard and look for an operating system to boot. In most cases, the first place it looks is the floppy disk drive (FDD), then to the hard disk drive (HDD) and then the optical disk drive (ODD; your CD/DVD-ROM). Some BIOS will also look to boot from a SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface; pronounced "scuzzy") drive. You probably don't have (and don't need) SCSI, so we won't worry about that.
The FDD, HDD and ODD are all connected to your motherboard by cables. On your motherboard you will see three connectors for these drives. The leads on the back of a FDD will only connect to a FDD cable which will only attach to the FDD controller on your motherboard.
Most HDDs and ODDs connect to the motherboard with IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) cables. IDE cables have three connectors; one seats on the motherboard and the other two can be attached to one device each. Your motherboard probably has two IDE channels so it can suppport a total of four IDE devices.
There are three basic standards for data throughput over an IDE channel: ATA-100, ATA-66 and ATA-33. Most new HDDs operate at the ATA-100 standard, while most ODDs operate at the ATA-33 speed (optical drives don't read as fast as magnetic drives). When placing drives on an IDE channel, you should never mix devices with different throughput. That is, put your ODDs on one channel and your HDDs on another. If you put an ATA-100 HDD on the same IDE channel as an ATA-33 CD-RW, data will move through the channel at the slower speed. Likewise, if you have an ATA-100 HDD and an ATA-66 HDD, you should not have them both in your computer on the same IDE channel. There is a noticable performance hit if you do.
When you put more than one IDE device on the same channel, one is always the Master and the other is the Slave (If Aegis has made it this far through the post, he may have confused it with an S&M reference and is probably salivating right about now; if he hasn't, don't tell our Canadian friend that I just took a shot at him). When the BIOS load, it is going to look to boot first from the Master drive, and if it can't find an operating system there, it will go to the Slave and look for an OS. This applies to both HDDs and ODDs (some CDs are bootable such as the standard Windows 98SE disk).
If you look on the back of an IDE drive, you will see three things: the power connector, the IDE cable connector and a place where you set a jumper to determine the drive's role in your computer's operation. There are three basic jumper settings: Master, Slave and Cable Select.
If you look at the documentation that came with your HDD and ODDs, it will tell you how to set the jumpers on the drive. If you've lost that paperwork, go to the drive's manufacturer's webpage, click on "Support" and find a link to the documentation.
I prefer to set my drives manually with the jumpers, but you can buy IDE cables that will do it for you. If you have a Cable Select cable, one end will seat on the motherboard, the connector in the middle is the Slave and the connector on the other end is the Master. They're usually labled with pull tabs so you don't seat the Master connector on the motherboard.
Once you have all of this stuff set up in your case, go into the "Setup" in your BIOS the first time your computer boots and make sure that all of your settings are okay. You want to make sure that the HDD that is going to boot is the Master drive on one of your IDE channels and that the computer will look to boot from the HDD before it goes to the ODDs. You also generally want to set the Master ODD as the one with the faster read speed, but setting the ODD Master/Slave is less important than for the HDD. However, you need to make sure that each channel has a Master and a Slave; you computer will not function if they are not accounted for (or so I'm told; I've never tried).
That's the roundabout explanation of IDE Masters and Slaves. There will be a quiz next time. Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, but football was on today.