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I reformatted a computer, and now it freezes when I put a disk in the rom drive. I'm pretty sure it's a problem with the master/slave settings, so what is the best way to set this up? I have 2 rom drives and 2 hard drives. Which ones should be the masters and slaves? I put the jumpers on the roms to CS.

The HD with your OS should be the master, and the other the slave. Both rom drives can be set to slave.

Personally, I hard set the jumpers on each drive to Master or Slave instead of using CS.
But that's because I'm an old fashioned kind of guy.

Back when I ran a PATA setup, I made both hard drives the master on their respective channels and made the opticals the slaves.

However I do recall having a problem with an optical not being detected until I flashed the motherboard with a BIOS update.

If you're having problems, make sure that both your mobo and your optical drives are running the latest firmware/BIOS.

Errr... So you mean like this?

Primary Master= HD with operating system
Secondary Master=other hard drive
primary slave=rom
secondary slave=rom

That?

Superman wrote:I reformatted a computer, and now it freezes when I put a disk in the rom drive. I'm pretty sure it's a problem with the master/slave settings, so what is the best way to set this up? I have 2 rom drives and 2 hard drives. Which ones should be the masters and slaves? I put the jumpers on the roms to CS.

What are the jumpers on the hard drives set to?

CS stands for Cable Select, and it means that the device will automatically determine whether it is Master or Slave by its position on the cable. The middle connector is Slave; the end connector is Master.

I'm pretty sure that if, for example, you set the CD-ROM on CS and plugged the end connector into it, and set the hard drive to Master and plugged it into the middle connector, it would cause Problems, because both devices would be trying to be Master.

Generally I've found that if you're going to go CS, you should set all of your devices to CS. It's really much simpler that way.

Uraniun235 wrote:Generally I've found that if you're going to go CS, you should set all of your devices to CS. It's really much simpler that way.

I'll set the Roms to CS, but what do I do with the drives? Do they have to be configured?

Yes.
Most all hard drives have a diagram on the label that tells the jumper positions needed for Master/Slave/Cable Select settings.

The plot thickens.

I'm thinking maybe my hard drive is messed up. I reloaded my Windows XP, but whenever I put my driver disk in, it freezes. It also won't install anything. Shit.

So far, I've narrowed this problem to the Roms not running. I've tried a few, and they just sort of freeze up. I've installed a few things using my USB drive.

Any ideas why the roms would do this? Is it my cable connecting them to the mother board? Could be it be a setting in bios?

Do you have it set up the way you describe:

Primary Master= HD with operating system
Secondary Master=other hard drive
primary slave=rom
secondary slave=rom

If so, this is what I'd try.

First, go into the BIOS and make sure that the drive settings are on 'auto' for each IDE channel.
Second, while I doubt that it's a cable because your HD's are working, but you can replace the cables to eliminate that possibility.
Third, if you've set everything on CS and it's not working, reset the jumpers to hard code Master/Slave on the respective drives.

BTW, which motherboard are you using?
Sometimes there are known issues with certain hardware combos that later get resolved in BIOS/Firmware updates.