"Arrgghhh!" You may say, "Another novice hardware specialist on the loose in the discussion forums....!"

By my 10th day on the job with a large Library system and I've had to replace 3 cd-roms in our staff computers. Never could get any of them to work. The systems administrator fixed the last one with a quick jumper change according to the "master/slave" set up, then began to tell me how complicated the master slave relationship is and that I will need to read the ref. books for a week to understand it. Can anyone here give me a quick tutorial, or linkage, that might cut the drivel abit?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

A modern PC has two IDE channels. Each channel can support two IDE devices, for a total of four IDE devices. Devices are, for example, harddrives and CD drives. On each channel one device is the "master", the other one is the "slave". Harddrives and CD drives have a set of jumper pins, where you can move a jumper connector to either the "master" or the "slave" position (they also have a "cable-select" position which is seldom used thesedays). When installing two drives on the same channel (which uses one IDE cable) you set the jumpers on one to master, on the other to slave. Plug in the IDE cable -- usually the master is placed at the end of the cable -- and the power lead. That's about it.

I agree .

Another point to remember is try not to link a hard drive as master and a cd rom as slave. This will result in a decrease in perfomance. In otherwords slower data finding.

This tip may be worth remembering as well. If you are running win 98 and you put an audio disk into the tray and your system hangs. Look at the DMA setting and uncheck it if is checked. This frustration nearly cost me a hefty chunk for a 2 second job.

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If it aint broke dont fix it !!!

The PC Guide has a very good article concerning IDE Interfaces (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/index.htm) and a good one on CD ROMs (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/cd/index.htm)

If you have problems of this type to deal with on a regular basis, you might want to check into the Disk Edition (http://www.pcguide.com/disk/index.htm).

I'll go out on a limb here, maybe I shouldn't say this, but it sounds like your system administrator wants you to think it's much more difficult to learn computers than it really is. Sleddog's post covers the basics very well, and as you can see, it shouldn't take a week to understand what he typed in less than 5 minutes...I'd even be willing to take a guess that he's afraid you might someday assume his occupational position...Go ahead and learn, he has to retire someday...

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If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you!
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Thank you all for your replies. I got it!