The Drive Way - CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, and CD-RWs
(Page 5 of 10 )
In the mid-1990s, “multimedia” computers (computers with built-in CD-ROM drives) reached “mass-market” status—an installation base of over 50 million customers. Today, according to the Photonics Industry and Technology Development Association (PITDA), there are over 118 million worldwide shipments of CD-ROM, CD-RW, and DVD-ROM drives every year. In addition, about 5.7 billion CD-R discs will be sold this year, further expanding the market and reducing the cost of writable discs everywhere. CD-R’s are a great and very economical way of backing up specific data and delivering proposals, presentations, and reports, many of which can barely fit on a floppy disk anymore.
Drive Installation Procedures Before you dive into installing a drive into your server, you must take two steps to ensure proper installation: find the location of pin 1 on the device and configure the jumpers for master and slave. The master device is the first one that is checked by the BIOS for an OS. If the hard drives are not configured properly, the system may attempt to boot up from the slave (thinking it’s the master) or not recognize anything at all, in which case you’ll get one or two of a variety of responses, including
- A No Operating System Found error message
- A Cannot Find NTLDR or NTDETECT error message
- A No ROM Basic error message
- The Blue Screen of Death
- A message about hardware corruption or a virus
- The system hangs
Even if you have an OS on the slave (in a multiboot environment), it still may not boot because the Master Boot Record (MBR) is on the master drive (more details about this are provided in Chapter 10).
Pin 1
When installing a cable to a hard drive, either a CD-ROM or floppy disk drive, the red end of the cable must be at pin 1 of the appropriate socket. The location of pin 1 can be distinguished in several ways. It may be a blatant label, as in Figure 6-3, or more elusive as shown next. There may not be any sign at all, and you may need to check the device documentation for the correct location of pin 1. Typically, in a hard drive or CD-ROM drive, pin 1 is next to the power connector.
Master and Slave
Most ATA hard drives will include a diagram or label for the proper configuration as master or slave. This diagram can determine the proper configuration for master or slave, “MA” signifying Master, “SL” for Slave, and “CS” for Cable Select.
 This chapter is from Build Your Own Server, by Tony Caputo (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004, ISBN: 0072227281). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now. |
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