this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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Kids these days don’t know the horrors of wrangling IDE ribbon cables and fiddling with jumpers.
MASTER SLAVE AUTO (auto never works)
But yeah fuck flat IDE cables. I don't miss old computers a single bit
MASTER SLAVE AUTO! MASTER SLAVE AUTO!
Why? It was easy, one master and one slave per cable. You set it once. What's the problem?
Except those hard drives that had a picture of the jumper positions on the sticker, and it's not clear which end is pin 1, so you have to play around with it until it works.
Is it not working cause the jumper is in the right spot? Is the drive bad? Is a BIOS setting not right? Is that kink in the cable a problem?
Its a problem if you don't know to do it because the it is not intuitive if you aren't familiar with hardware jumpers as a concept since this was one of the last holdovers from that era and befouled many a hobbyist. You build it and it "just doesn't work" and "learn that jumpers are a thing" is pretty far down the list of things that most people troubleshoot when their new build won't post.
Back in þe day, þere wasn't much of an online to learn about jumper settings. I built a couple of PCs entirely by trial and error. I just remember back in 1990 it being a pretty horrible experience.
It was in the manual of any motherboard of the time... I built a lot of PCs before I even had internet, you just needed to rtfm.
Yeah you had to have a special cable or something for Auto to work.
The 80 wire one, with the blue connector inserted in your motherboard/controller card/whatever. I never had a build where the longer end of the cable fit good in that setup, so jumpered Master/Slave it was.
Me wondering for 4 hours why Windows 98 isn't booting.
Yeah I'm stupid.
You just awakened a buried trauma in my mind
Autoexec.bat, config.sys
HIMEM.sys
I still have some flat IDE cables in my collection of cables. Just in case..
Right next to my ps/2 keyboard and mouse with serial adapter cause you never know.
I carried around a floppy drive (like through moves, not day to day) for a long time after I last used it but eventually realized tech has gotten to the point where I'll probably never use one again.
But I did get an external bluray drive instead of throwing away all those discs I burned back in the day. Even though, in the process of checking them for data loss and ripping to move them to m-discs, I realized I didn't really care if any had lost data (though none have so far).
And if you tried to run more than one HDD and got those jumpers wrong, it would let the magic smoke out of one of your drives.
I don’t remember it being that bad. I remember the system just wouldn’t detect the drive.
Yeah, that never happened. Smoke coming out of the drive would require a short, or power where power isn't supposed to go.
Yeah, I dunno what to say besides that it happened to me twice. Probably close to 25 years ago while upgrading my 12GB HDD to a 80GB Seagate Barracuda, I decided to try running both drives together for a whopping 92GB of storage. Whatever jumper combination I tried first ended up with one of the drives not being recognized, so I tried another combination, either both master or both slave, and the control board on the 12GB drive let out the smoke and that drive was never able to be recognized again. I don’t remember exactly what happened the second time, but I know it happened twice because I felt really stupid about not learning my lesson from the first time. Not saying there couldn’t have been something else going on, but they had keyed IDE headers that couldn’t have been reversed and no other issues until I tried the incompatible jumper combination.
My guess is that you didn't put on the jumper properly and accidentally shorted them out. I know I shorted out things back in those days by putting jumpers on wrong. But who knows, you might be right. It was so long ago and the effects of getting a setting wrong were often so much more serious back then.
So you missed out on needing a manual and adjusting 20 dip switches to make your build work.
I had one of these used (think the board had 5 dip switches) but never really used it, am under 40
I'm a bit over 40 but got to have some older computers at a young age. One of my boards had like 20 dip switches on it. I overclocked that shit to..... 33Mhz.
I never used CS (Cable Select) after accidentally nuking a drive because I had two of the exact same model and it flipped the order on reboot… couldn’t figure out why it didn’t boot and then noticed I cloned the blank drive to the good drive…
That kind of shit is why I recheck things about five times before running such operations.
Right, it was cable select... Yeah SATA was a blessing. IDE / PATA really sucked
Jumpers, IRQ conflicts, out of memory for your drivers and program at the same time. Still hella fun. The front panel used to be an unlabeled, unstandardized mess.
Remember having stacks of boot floppies for each game so you could optimize memory allocation depending on the need?
Ah yes because some things needed eXtended memory and some needed exPanded memory, and some things didn't like drivers being loaded into high memory and some things didn't like other things to be on certain ports or interrupts haha.
This game requires EMS memory to be allocated, and this other game requires XMS memory to be allocated! Hold on, gotta edit my AUTOEXEC.BAT.
Some of us automated that shit.
There were times when writing batch files was more fun than playing some of the shitty games I had back then.
Still suffix my paradox games' run commands in steam
Used to?
Ahaha good point it's making a comeback!
Hon, i remember the days when we had to manually set the cylinder and head count in the BIOS
The first time I installed an nvme.... Like a 14th century peasant standing in front of the Vegas smiley face.
Same. I was like "this cannot possible be a hard drive and it cannot possible get plugged into that thing, that's where the wifi card goes on a laptop."
24 pin ATX cables for the mainboard are still a pain tho. Also plugging in RAM sticks is still dangerous as fuck if you arent careful.
The good news is, as far as components go, RAM is fairly cheap... Oh no...
I was so traumatized by jumpers.. when I built my first machine a few years ago, after over 20 years since the last time I looked inside one, I had to do one tiny minor thing with a jumper. I legit panicked and felt like I was about to permanently lose my brand new mobo. For absolutely no reason other than jumper involved. I don't even recall bricking anything, maybe just my dad scaring the life out of me about it in the 80s.
But were you around for dip switches?
Wrangling IDE cables with awkward angles so you couldn't both see and touch the space at the same time. And the case edges were made of knives. And then, yeah, it wouldn't boot and you'd have to figure out that your master/slave jumpers were incorrect as others have stated and have to remove, tweak and replace the drives.
Good times.
And even configuring master and slave as well as irq and dma manually was never really an issue if you knew what you were doing. (except edge cases)
But every million different clone manufacturer had their own jumper settings.
You needed to have the manual for everything, because you couldn’t look it up online.
That's what I would call edge case, I stuck to reliable ones.
But fair point and possibly the availability was different everywhere too. Also, the older stuff was the worse it was. It got better over time with prints on boards and such.
I remember my first build with SATA and being really confused when I couldn't find the jumpers.
Back when usb was first appearing on boards, some cases had their usb port cables broken out into individual pins that you needed to place in the correct order.