Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0 - User Guide User Manual

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Appendix A Hard disks and BIOS setup

10. After finishing the work, turn off the computer, set the jumper on the disk to the

master position if you want to make the disk bootable (or leave it in slave position
if the disk is installed as additional data storage).

A.1.2

Motherboard sockets, IDE cable, power cable

There are two slots on the motherboard to which the hard disks can be connected:
primary IDE and secondary IDE.

Hard disks with an IDE interface are connected to the motherboard via a 40- or 80-
thread flat marked cable — one of the threads of the cable is red.

Two IDE hard disks can be connected to each of the sockets, i.e. there can be up to
4 hard disks of this type installed in the PC. (There are three plugs on each IDE
cable: 2 for hard disks and 1 for the motherboard socket.)

As noted, IDE cable plugs are usually designed so that there is only one way to
connect them to the sockets. Usually, one of the pinholes is filled on the cable plug,
and one of the pins facing the filled hole is removed from the motherboard socket,
so it becomes impossible to plug the cable in the wrong way.

In other cases, there is a jut on the plug on the cable, and an indentation in the
socket of the hard disk and of the motherboard. This also ensures that there only
one way to connect the hard disk and the motherboard.

In the past, this design of plug did not exist, so there was an empirical rule:

the

IDE

cable is connected to the hard disk socket so that the marked thread is the closest

to the power cable

, i.e. the marked thread connected to pin #1 of the socket. A

similar rule was used for connecting cables with the motherboard.

Incorrect connection of the cable with either the hard disk or the motherboard does
not necessarily damage the electronics of the disk or the motherboard. The hard
disk is simply not detected or initialized by BIOS.

There are some models of hard disks, especially the older ones, for which incorrect

connection damaged the electronics of the drive.

We will not describe all the types of hard disks. Currently the most widespread are those with

IDE or SCSI interfaces. Unlike IDE hard disks, there can be from six to 14 SCSI hard disks

installed in your PC. However, you need a special SCSI controller (called a host adapter) to

connect them. SCSI hard disks are not usually used in personal computers (workstations), but

are found mostly in servers.

Aside from an IDE cable, a 4-thread power cable must be connected to the hard
disks. There is only one way to plug in this cable.