I am broke as hell, and trying to replace my Pentium 4 HT with an Athlon 64 (Skt754), but it doesn't want me to use it. I Have a PC Chips M861G mobo, Athlon 64 3200+, 120GB HDD, an IDE DVDRW drive (probably LiteOn or something). It has 1GB of memory and the other Gig is in the mail. Anyway, I put in a 500W Ultra modular PSU and tried to fire it up. It posted at first, but would not boot because I was having conflicts with Master and Slave. It's IDE. Don't laugh. I have a SATA HDD, but I lost it. How the hell you lose a 250GB HDD is beyond me! Chemo, maybe?
Anyway, I set the DVD drive to CS and the HDD to CS. IT won't post. My IDE cable is one of those sweet glowing, rounded Thermaltake cables. I hate the ribbons. I changed the HDD to "slave". Nothing. I check all my connections and everything is tight. Nothing. I unhook my IDE cable from the mobo and no POST. I disconnect everything and reconnect everything, insuring everything is tight. It doesn't help that the case is so tiny on the inside.
Man I hope I didn't short this shit out! I can't afford to replace it! I've built many PCs in my miserable life and have NEVER ONCE shorted anything out by ESD. This is really a bad way to end an epicly shitty day! I need beer.
Well, I think I figured that one out. The good thing is nothing's fried. The bad news is no Windows XP is getting installed tonight. I think I unseated the memory accidentally when I was moving the HDD in the extremely compact case. I re-seated the memory and everything fired right up. The bad news is I think the DVDRW drive is no good. It is not booting.
I got it working. The memory became un-seated from its socket when I moved the HDD because the case is so compact, If I have to remove the HDD, I have to remove the mobo to get it out! I reseated the memory and that was it. I reshuffled the Master and slave settings. Nothing is "CS" anymore.
I almost kicked it many times and I did swear infront of children. How's that?
Now, the optical drive isn't working. I think it's just a bad optical drive. I'm going to throw a spare in there just for installation purposes, then buy a new one later. I'm thinking about installing Windows from a USB device.
you can have 2 devices per IDE channel. one must be master, the other needs to be slave (if you have 2 per channel)
. the slave device piggie backs on the masters IDE controller... so make sure the faster of the two is your master (in this case, your hdd).
cs allows the cable to pick what drive is what (note. this only works with cables designed to work with the cs method). the cable will say next to the connector if it is a cs cable. otherwise, you can hack a normal ide like so (http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/ide-cable-select.html).
I think my IDE cables are modern enough to assign the drives when jumpers are in CS position. It's one of those sweet, rounded, cables that Thermaltake made in the last few years that IDE was still around. I hate those old ribbons! They give the computer a really cluttered look, they impede airflow and they are more of a hassle to work with. Most importantly, they look old and not very "Gamer".
