Win98banter - View Single Post - Confusing Hard Drive jumpers (PATA or IDE)

**JJ[_2_]** · October 15th 17, 09:09 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion

On Sat, 14 Oct 2017 23:38:31 -0500, wrote:

I bought a new IDE (also called PATA) hard drive on ebay. It's a white
label drive, model WL120PATA872.

I;m beginning to think it's defective. I have never had all this trouble
partitioning and formatting a hard drive.

Part of the problem is that it has TWO sets of jumper settings on the
label. One says "16 heads". The other says "32gb Clip". Both are
different for the jumpers.

I have it on the first IDE cable connector, (as a slave or second
drive). My boot drive is on the second or end of cable connector.
(Thats how it's supposed to be). Just for the heck of it, I reversed the
connectors.

I cant even get Dos to boot, so I cant run Fdisk on it. But I'm not sure
which jumper setting to use.

Anyone know?

Being a slave, I know not to use the MASTER setting.

For the heck of it, I put my USB to HDD cables on it, and plugged it
into my XP machine. I loaded Partition Magic and that program is giving
me errors too. (Normally a great program).

If I at least know which jumper settings to use, that really would help.
If that dont do it, the drive must be bad.

Neither of those two jumpers is for configuring the HDD master-slave mode.

That "16 heads" jumper is for changing the drive geometry. It's for use on
UNIX systems.

The "32gb Clip" jumper is for limitting the drive capacity. For BIOSes that
don't support large capacity drive.

For HDDs without master-slave jumper, it could either mean that the mode
would be defined by the IDE cable plug - like shown on below pictures.

http://www.asrock.com/support/faq/20061020-01.jpg

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/img/16837_ide-cable.gif

http://www.frontx.com/pro/c203_018p2.gif

http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/1304159566.or.33063.gif

Or, the mode will be auto selected.

Or, it can only run in master mode.