Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

To have the drive operate as a master drive, no jumpers should be installed

across any of the four pins. That’s simple enough and that’s the case on most

new hard drives. To have the drive operate as a slave drive, a jumper has to

be placed across CD.

To use a cable select scheme in which the design of the cable determines

whether the drive is a master or slave, in this case you would jumper DB.

But please... don’t assume that what I’m saying here is what you need to

do with your particular monkey. Read the instruction manual and jumper

accordingly.

I have seen some drives with three pairs of jumper pins, which allows for

seven different jumper settings with one jumper in use and potentially a total

of 17 different settings using three jumpers. But the fact is that modern drives

are so sophisticated that just about the only hardware switch that needs to

be set is the one that differentiates between master, slave, or cable select,

and that only requires use of one jumper and four pins.

Configuring the BIOS and the drive .................................................

Today, most new drives come with a self-booting floppy diskette or CD that

automates much of the configuration process for a new drive. The first step

is make sure your system BIOS is set up to recognize the presence of a new

hard drive. In the old days of computing, it was necessary to instruct the

Polarity

43 1 C A

Jumpers DB

Figure 7-3:
A typical
back end of
a standard
hard drive,
showing the
location
for jumpers
and the
polarity peg
that assures
proper
positioning
of the data
cable.

Chapter 7: Easing In to Hard Disks 133