When installing a hard drive and a CD-ROM drive on the same IDE channel?

Answer 1

You can install the hard drive and a cd/cvd disc drive on the same IDE channel,

just set jumpers to HDD=Master & optical drive to slave.or if your system supports cable select, set both jumpers to this setting.This solution is usefull if one of your IDE channels has "blown"

Answer 2

It would be best to configure the CD drive as the Master and have the hard drive set to slave. This configuration normally allows the CD drive to function when hard drive is not bootable on a single channel IDE.

Answer 3

IDE supports two drives per interface.

If you only have one drive, it should be configured as "master" (and ideally should go at the far end of the cable if the cable has connectors for two drives).

If you have two, one of them has to be configured as master, the other one as slave (sometimes you can get away with setting them both to "cable select", though personally I've seen this NOT work at least as often as I've seen it work as intended; the cable has to be set up for it, and not all older ones were).

It doesn't really matter which is which. Newer documentation refers to them as "device 0" and "device 1" instead, which is arguably better terminology, since "master/slave" implies that one of the drives controls the other, which is not actually the case.

Answer 4

Typically this is done with jumper pins.