March 23rd, 2009 
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One of the more confusing things users run into are hard drive bios problems. Whether it is updating the bios, adding a new hard drive, or messing with the settings – it can be intimidating for the novice.
At some point, you may have to change your hard drive bios settings. This could be because you are adding a drive or changing the arrangement. The first thing you need to understand is that there is a big difference between an IDE hard drive and a SATA hard drive. The IDE drive will have a big ribbon cable connector that is wide on the end. Sata cables look much smaller and have small connectors. Yeah, not very descriptive. Pictures work best:
IDE:
SATA cable:
Okay, that’s better now. Now, not only is there a big difference between SATA and IDE cables, but they are different in how they are handled on the cabling. IDE hard drive bios settings can be confusing. That’s because there are master and slave positions. So, let’s take an example. If you have a hard drive running XP and you want that to be the boot drive, you would set that as the master, or primary, hard drive. If you had a data drive, where you wanted to dump all your music, then you would set that to slave. The thing to remember is that this is actually done on the hard drive itself. There are small rubber jumpers on the back, where the cable is inserted. Depending on what pins the jumper(s) is on, it will either be in master, slave, or cable select mode. Cable select is simply where the position on the cable determines master or slave.
Now, hard drive bios settings for SATA are actually different because there are no master or slave positions. Each SATA drive is primary. I’ve also found that IDE and SATA sometimes have a hard time playing with each other. Meaning, that sometimes hard drives balk at you or don’t even show up! I will say that the hard drive bios can be set to boot from either IDE or SATA in this arrangement. That is done in the Bios itself. Another caveat is that some motherboards have master and slave channels on the board itself. That means that you have to connect your SATA drive to the correct connector.
Other issues that arise are bios passwords that someone put on there or you forgot. There are ways to get around that. One simple way is to do a reset jumper or remove the CMOS battery for a bit. There are other ways to do it, but they are a little more involved.
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