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hakgipc

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In the booting process, the BIOS will first look at the Primary IDE connector, and then at the secondary one. By default, the primary master tends to get booted first, but nowadays that's all configurable of course.

During Windows installation, drive letters are assigned as drives (and the partitions on them) are found. And when finding drives the order is Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary Slave.

These days that's followed by SATA1 and up.

A single IDE cable can connect 2 drives to the MoBo, but then one must be set to Master and the other to Slave. They will share the connection, and with this master/slave thing they deal with who gets to go first.

It's best to put only 1 device, as Master of course, on a cable. It'll be faster, as there's no other drive on the cable to contend with for bandwidth.

Oh, and a little punctuation and capitalisation in your post would've been nice.

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I think that back in the days of yore, you could only boot off of your primary master. Its just a way of having more ports on your motherboard now, and is being replaced with SATA. Have a look at the wikipedia articles regarding IDE if you want more technical info.

If you have 1 HD, and 1 optical drive, put the HD on the primary master, and the optical on secondary master.

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It's some thing like that VaKo... you will notice older computers will only allow you to boot off "Drive C" or "Drive D" (as well as the other usual boot devices). "Drive C" and "Drive D" refering to IDE0:0 and IDE0:1 respectivly.

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During Windows installation, drive letters are assigned as drives (and the partitions on them) are found. And when finding drives the order is Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary Slave.

These days that's followed by SATA1 and up.

Windows doesn't actually assign drive letters like this.

Windows detects all the drives and then the first partition of the first drive gets 'C' then the first partition on the second drive gets 'D' etc. until all the first partition are done. Then windows goes back to the first drive and assigns the rest of the partitions say 'E' and 'F' then it will look at the second drive and assign the other partitions in order.

Its different if windows 'created' the partition in the installation as it will then assign drive letters in the order that the partitions are created.

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I would also like to add while it dose do this dur in windows instalation, windows can also change the drive lettering if some thing happens that it dosn't like. I can't remmeber an example of some thing it dosn't like, but it has some thing to do with changing drive orders. Any way, if you change the drive order, and you upset windows, it will rescan for all partions and drives and reasighn them letters. If, for some reason, windows set your system partion as any thing but C (whcih it dose do) and windows desides to rescan for hard drives and partions, you are fucked, becasue it will reasighn your system partion to C (reguardless of what ever it was befor) and prevent any thing from running.

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