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Old October 15th 17, 10:19 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
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Default Confusing Hard Drive jumpers (PATA or IDE)

On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 15:09:41 +0700, JJ wrote:

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.


I do have the cable installed right. My cable is the old style 40 wire
one, but that came with this 17 year old computer. Oddly enough, I did
have the cable backwards on the original drives (Master/Slave), and it
still worked fine. It's probably been that way for years. There is a
jumper setting marked "Cable Select". If that dont work, I guess this
drive can only be used as a master, or it's defective.

Strange enough, since this drive is giving me grief, I grabbed a 160gb
drive, and had it connected and partitioned in minutes. I really did not
think that would work, because I was told that Win98 can not use any
drive larger than 120gb. The partitions add up to 131gb after I
formatted them. So, apparently there is some wasted space, but that
drive works fine.

If I can only make this drive a master, I have a bigger problem. My
floppy drive has died. It's been years since I used it, and it must have
died from no use. This computer cant boot from USB, and dont have a
CDrom drive. So, if I must make a Master HDD, I will have to buy a new
floppy drive first.