[Dave Westlake]

Hello,

A technical question about hard drives...  I have a WD elements 500gb hard drive (Serial ATA) for which the power cable has broken.  New cables are hard to come across (ebay is the only option and expensive) and besides I would like to increase my PC's internal capacity.

So, I want to connect it to my PC as a secondary 'slave' drive.  Apparently the jumper settings on SATA drives do not need to be set to slave, but I am keen to make sure the PC doesn't try and boot from this new drive (thinking it is the master).  How can I ensure this if there is no way of setting it as slave?

Thanks....
Dave

[slackline]

On boot up go into the BIOS settings  & you can set the boot order. Depends on your motherboard/BIOS where this will be, but it should br the somewhere.

[slackline]

To be more explicit its likely that you can choose the boot order for devices (USB/HDD/DVD drive), but you should also be able to set the order of HDD's to be booted from.

Its not a big problem if you set these wrong, just power off the computer and disconnect the new HDD and you'll be back to how you were before.

[GCW]

Yup. All you'll need to do us put the drives/DVD/floppy in the right order in BIOS. And you can change it later if there's any issues.

[Jim]

SATA only connects 1 device per cable so there is no master/slave jumper. ive yet to come across a bios that would select a newly added drive to boot from so just stick it in and it should just work.

[slackline]

I have, its was due to the HDD order being set to try one of the unused connectors that I plugged one of the two new drives into, but it was a piece of piss to resolve.

[Dave Westlake]

Great - thanks guys.  I'll have a go later.  Went into the boot menu just to see and it seems pretty simple.

Cheers