I bought LG GSA-4163B dvd burner & LG DVD ROM GDR-8163B I set up the dvd rom as slave to HD drive from primary IDE slot & dvd burner as master from secondary IDE slot When I boot up it does not pick the DVD ROM as primary slave. Do I need a jumper pin in the HD drive to be set as master as it did not have one when I had a dvd rom & cd burner PC specs are gigabyte GA-VA m/brd, Athlon XP 2800, 1024 ddr ram, nvidia geforce 5200 v/card with 256 ram. I look forward to a reply. Thanks dsurte66
There are quite a few ways that this could be a problem. Assuming you have 80 pin cables and a newer MB, try setting all your drives to CS and see what happens. If not, then you need a pin on the HD to master and the ROM on slave. I would also try the ROM as the slave on the RW cable as you will probably use it to read to the HD. It is also possible your BIOS need to see these drives first and then save changes and reboot.
Color of your ribbon cable plugs=Blue to motherboard, Black=Master and to HDD and Grey=Slave and to DVD-Rom. Jumper the HDD as a Master and Jumper the DVD-Rom as a Slave. 80 Wire ribbon cables have the colors I mentioned. All black ends are 40wire ribbon cables. I would suggest that you also have an 80wire ribbon cable on your Secondary IDE since this affects the DMA of your burner. Anything over a DMA2 will need this cable, and most newer burners are DMA 4 or better. Stay away from CS since this is just a fast way of PC manufacturers to speed up assembly. Once you have your jumpers set correctly and your devices cabled properly, your bios should pick up on these changes and you should be good to go. If not, then re-enter CMOS and make sure that it shows your changes, re-save and reboot.
I agree that CS is a short cut and sometimes is problematic. But sometimes I have had some combinations of MB and drives where it solved the problem.
chas0039 The points I was making with dsurte66 with his bios not recognizing the changes to his devices on their IDE cables are these: A Primary IDE cable has just two plugs. A Secondary IDE cable also has just two plugs. Some cables do not like CS positions. Some devices do not like CS positions. Any Device will work on 80 Wire Ribbon Cables since they are backward compatible. 80 Wire Ribbon Cables will assist devices with higher DMA settings since that was why they were created in the first place, helping to eliminate unwanted “noise” produced. Every device likes or has no problems with Jumpered positions such as Master or Slave. One device on each cable will be a Master device and once Device on each cable will be a Slave device. There can be no mistake by the bios when setup this way. I too am not saying that CS doesn't have its place. But personally I also feel that a Device can/will never be confused with what its role is or should be, once its Jumpered correctly to either a Master or a Slave. With only 4 devices max on two ribbons, it should be easy to setup properly.
