Jumper settings for hard drives?

Question

I am a decent computer technician, but no one has ever been able to train me on being able to get different brands of hard drives (especially older maxtors) to work on the same IDE cable as master/slave.
I look at the "legends" and sometimes, the only way to get the drive to be seen in BIOS (even when it's a stand alone) is to put the jumpers in a configuration that isn't on the legend at all.
As for the older Maxtors, there is no legend, just a pointer to something on the right side.
There seem to be theoretically 50 or more possible ways to put 2 jumpers and I've tried devoting hours to this to no avail.
Any tips or websites for this?
All the techs training me on this seem to have some inborn knowledge of where the jumpers should go. I can't think of any other explanation.

Answer 1

Hi. I have fiddled with hard drives since my first 40 megabyte job back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

The jumper settings are very important, they tell the ide system on the disk what the job it is doing.

Generally you leave it open for MASTER.

There are not that many combinations as the jumper pin only ever goes down over 2 pins, it is never, in my experience, put sideways over 2 pins.

I usually STORE a jumper pin by putting it sideways, dosn't make a circuit.

So, there are usually 4 possible pin positions.

Usually the MASTER is open pin, that is, no pin on the jumpers.

Slave is often one or the other ends of the pin set, closest or farthest away from the power inlet pin/plug.

Many drives have such tiny, tiny writing I often find it neccessary to use a magnifying glass to actually see the letters.

Sometimes they are on a sticker, sometimes imprinted into the plastic or alloy case near the pins. Almost always there is some notation of pin settings on the disk case.

If not you can usually get such info from the disk makers website, they do not normally change pin settings much from model to model.

Even over different manufacturers, the pin setting have been pretty much common, the same for each, for a while now.

That is my five cents worth... find the pin marked SLV for slave, the pin marked MST or MRT for master (often just no pins is master) , forget the other ones, the predate dinosaurs.

Happy jumperpinning then guv!

Answer 2

Well I work from 10 years with computers ...I mean this is my work so problem is preety old . Today 99% of IDE hard drives have only 3 choices A B & C . A=master B=slaves C=cable select .Well the problem is there are still 1% wich is with 2 jumpers instead of one .
A good way is to follow the next link : http://service.maxtor.com/rightnow/images/AC.htm
If you wanna know more.....
Feel free to contact me on yahoo messenger for more details.

Answer 3

Try looking on the manufacturer's website. They will have jumper diagrams there. Every hard drive is different in terms of jumpers...some have 2 jumpers, others only have one...the placement of the jumpers is also different.

Answer 4

see if this helps you. its the jumper settings for some of maxtors hard drives

Answer 5

you can see at the hdd bottom, there's a picture tell the maxtor jumper setting... i can picture it to u, but unfortunelly, we cant draw in here