If one drive has a jumper on master, and the other drive has no jumper at all, will the computer still read and boot from the master and treat the other as a slave by default?

Nope, depends totally on the drive that has no jumper.

There's a very good chance both will try and be master.

Just borrow the jumper from your CD drive and set the drive as master only device on your secondary IDE:thumbup:

Done as above and the HDD is acting perfectly inside my tower.

The only thing is I had to half-inch the power & IDE cable from the back of the CD writer. Is there such a thing as a 3 into 1 IDE ribbon? The board only has one IDE feed, probably because the primary CD drive is SATA.

Thanks

No 3 into 1, the max each IDE channel can read is 2 devices.

Damn.... So, basically to run 2 hard drives and a CD-R/W all of IDE I need a new motherboard which has two IDE plugs in it? :(

A new cheap SATA CDRW would be easier

A new cheap SATA CDRW would be easier

Good point - I just spotted a spare SATA slot :cool:

This seem OK? HP CD Re-Writer DVD Rom complete with cables NEW! on eBay (end time 16-Aug-09 18:39:45 BST)

Have you tried putting the HDD back in the external case and running it with the jumper on it?

I think it could have been that the master/slave selection was floating causing the IDE to USB bridge to get confused as the drive kept moving.

FWIW here is a new DVD writer with lightscribe on a sata link for not much more money:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?SAM-S223LO

Oh, that external case is no longer possible to use I promise In bits, cracked in many places and in my bin!

I think you'll probably find the problem was just that the people who built it used a WD drive as it was cheapest at the time and didn't bother to check if it needed to have a jumper on.

The whole thing was a Western Digital product. But I know what you mean. Just going to get a sata rewriter and be done with it.

WD drives are very "fussy" over jumper configuration. I have been repairing PCs/laptops for 10 years now and have worked on over 15,000 units and I can tell you now there is no drive worse than a Western Digital except maybe a Hitachi "Deskstar" sorry, I meant deathstar lol.

I didnt think to advise on checking the jumper config, I assumed it was either set to master or Slave.

On western digitals there are several jumper settings; Cable Select, Single or Master, Slave and Master with Slave present. Normally if the drive is used in conjunction with another HDD or other type of IDE drive you can get problems recognising either of the drives.

WD drives are very "fussy" over jumper configuration. I have been repairing PCs/laptops for 10 years now and have worked on over 15,000 units and I can tell you now there is no drive worse than a Western Digital except maybe a Hitachi "Deskstar" sorry, I meant deathstar lol.

I didnt think to advise on checking the jumper config, I assumed it was either set to master or Slave.

On western digitals there are several jumper settings; Cable Select, Single or Master, Slave and Master with Slave present. Normally if the drive is used in conjunction with another HDD or other type of IDE drive you can get problems recognising either of the drives.

I've said it to others before, but I'd be cautious about blaming drives based on very out of date information.

I've seen average failure data for I would guess millions of drives and I don't think the hitachi drives are anything like as bad as suggested. Many drive "failures" are in fact down to poor installation.