4Jun
How to setup Master and Slave type of two hard drives on Win7
Posted in Hard Drive Upgrade by manyuIf you have two hard drive and want to setup master slave setup hard drive on Windows 7, format the main hard drive and leave the other hard drive as is, you don’t need RAID. If these are both IDE drives, set your current drive to master and the new drive to slave. If these are SATA drives, there is no master/slave setup, just install it on an open SATA port and make sure the SATA port you have it plugged into is enabled in the BIOS.
All HDD’s were on IDE ports. Each IDE port and cable can support TWO HDD units and they each need a unique identifier. The system then was to make a Master and a Slave on each IDE port.
With today’s SATA systems there is only ONE drive on each SATA port, and there is no need for Master and Slave so they no longer exist on SATA systems. (They do still continue for IDE ports on a mobo).
Almost all systems set (some had no option – it just WAS this way) the Primary IDE Port Master unit as the boot device that was known as the C: Drive. All others were non-boot units usually, and it was common but incorrect to call those all “Slave” drives. In today’s systems the BIOS has a place where you specifically tell it which hardware device is the boot device. In fact, you tell it a sequence of devices to try, and any that are NOT in the sequence will not be used for booting purposes. For example, on my machine I have it set to try to boot from the floppy drive first; if that fails, then try the first optical drive; if that fails, try the HDD on the SATA_1 port; do not try any other hardware. I have a floppy drive, two optical drives, two internal SATA HDD’s, and an external HDD. Only ONE HDD can be used for booting, and it will be the C: drive. All the others are NOT “Slaves”, they are just other drive units used for data.
