I caught her on a park bench, making out with a *chaos* demon! Have you ever seen a chaos demon? They're all slime and antlers.

Spike ,'Sleeper'


Buffistechnology 3: "Press Some Buttons, See What Happens."

Got a question about technology? Ask it here. Discussion of hardware, software, TiVos, multi-region DVDs, Windows, Macs, LINUX, hand-helds, iPods, anything tech related. Better than any helpdesk!


Sean K - Jan 18, 2007 3:50:15 pm PST #300 of 25496
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty

Okay, new question in my neverending computer upgrade:

I tried to hook my old hard drive up as a slave to the new 200gb drive. I set the jumper on the new one to "master with slave present." The old drive surprisingly does not have a jumper diagram on the outside. I left the jumper off that drive and hoped it would let the other drive's master setting and its cable position do the selecting, but when I turned it on like that, the computer didn't like that and decided there was no boot drive. I unhooked the old drive and booted up again.

So, my question is, are jumper setting more or less universal across similar drives (ATA)? Can I use the jumper diagram from another drive to figure out what setting to use on the old drive? Or would I be able to find jumper settings with just a little Google time?


NoiseDesign - Jan 18, 2007 3:56:12 pm PST #301 of 25496
Our wings are not tired

They differ based on manufacturer and drive model. Go to the manufacturers website and you can usually track down the model number and get the jumper settings.


Sean K - Jan 18, 2007 3:57:29 pm PST #302 of 25496
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty

Thanks, ND.


Sean K - Jan 18, 2007 4:26:58 pm PST #303 of 25496
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty

Well phooey. I can't find the jumper for the old hard drive. Can I just go down to Radio Shack and buy a hard drive jumper?


Kalshane - Jan 18, 2007 5:21:39 pm PST #304 of 25496
GS: If you had to choose between kicking evil in the head or the behind, which would you choose, and why? Minsc: I'm not sure I understand the question. I have two feet, do I not? You do not take a small plate when the feast of evil welcomes seconds.

Sean, is your CD-ROM on a separate IDE cable from your hard drive? If so, just unplug the cable from the CD-ROM and plug it into your old hard drive. If it defaults to master without a jumper, it should work fine if it's on its own cable.

ETA: I'm assuming in the above you're just planning on plugging the old drive in long enough to get the data off of it, not leaving it there permanently.


Sean K - Jan 18, 2007 5:33:27 pm PST #305 of 25496
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty

Yeah, it's a temporary thing, Kalshane. And yes, there's a seperate cable for the CD drive. I guess as long as one drive boots and can mount the other one, it doesn't matter which is the boot drive, I just copy the old files over, pull the old drive and be done.


Kalshane - Jan 18, 2007 5:38:38 pm PST #306 of 25496
GS: If you had to choose between kicking evil in the head or the behind, which would you choose, and why? Minsc: I'm not sure I understand the question. I have two feet, do I not? You do not take a small plate when the feast of evil welcomes seconds.

Well, the CD-ROM should be on the secondary IDE. Which means if you hook up the old drive to that cable, and the new drive to the original IDE cable (which should be plugged into the primary IDE port on the motherboard already) it will boot from the new drive. The jumper settings only apply to the individual cable/IDE port.


§ ita § - Jan 18, 2007 7:37:13 pm PST #307 of 25496
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

I don't have the requisite ADCness to report it, Rob, so you should. Is there a way to look at fix progress from the outside? Now I'm all curious.


Rob - Jan 19, 2007 4:45:40 am PST #308 of 25496

I reported the bug. Only I can look at the progress, but I'll report back when the status changes.


Typo Boy - Jan 19, 2007 9:07:34 am PST #309 of 25496
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

I ran into a client whose computer had mysteriously slowed down. I asked questions, and it turned out that it happened after a failed attempt to print to pdf useing the PDF write print driver bundled with Acrobat. It turned out the file was still in the printer driver queue eating up 80%+ of CPU time. Deleted it from the queue. Tested it. That driver is frelled. It happens every time. So I'm going to do the obvious - delete and reinstall pdf write from the Acrobat CD. If that does not work I'll delete Acrobat and reinstall from CD. (And if that does not work, rather screw around with it more I'll put in some inexpensive third party software that provides the same "print file to pdf" service as acrobat.) But I still wonder: has anyone run into this with Acrobat? Any thoughts on why this happens?