Jumper Settings on Your Optical and Hard Drives
By Tim Brennan

For the last month or so my PC has been taking ages to start up. It would get as far as the first screen displaying the motherboard logo but then would not go any further. At first I thought that it was crashing, but then i figured out that if you left it for 2-3 minutes it would happily carry on as normal.

This morning I felt brave enough to tackle this problem - i thought how hard can this one be. Several hours later and I have solved the problem - hooray! Am I good or what?

Ok. Maybe this is a bit sad, but if one day this problem happens to your PC, you will definetly appreciate this guide. OK, after many false leads here's what I did that worked for me.

First of all I started stripping down my pc to see if i could identify the troublesome component. One by one I unpluged the DVD drives, Floppy Drive, Second HDD, TV Tuner, Network Cable- each time rebooting to see if the problem went away. I even took the CMOS battery and RAM out and put them firmly back in place. But, the problem was still with me.

After scratching my head for a while, I unplugged all the USB cables and BINGO the problem went away. I was pretty chuffed and started plugging in all the drives and everything again. When i rebooted - DISSASTER - the problem had come back but for a bit less time.

After more unpluging and more rebooting, I found the trouble was coming from the DVD ROM and the DVD burner. I thought that it was probably something to do with the jumper settings on those drives. If your new to jumpers, i'm not talking about the type you get for chrismas from your auntie. Jumpers are small, plastic, removeable connecters that sit on two pins - according to which two pins they are on gives different functions. Jumpers are used on the mother board to reset the BIOS settings and they are also used if two optical drives are sharing one channel. The jumper positions tell the computer which one is the MASTER and which is the SLAVE.

By moving the jumper settings i experimented with different jumper positions and then i got into a bit of a pickle. The computer kept crashing and spewing garbage all over the screen on booting. I was a bit worried now.

I took the two drives out of the machine and took a good look at them. One the burner the jumper positions were all vertical - i.e. connecting the pins in vertical columns. I looked at the other drive and it showed this next to the jumper pins:

CSM
SLA

I mistook the C S M as positions for Cable select, Slave, and Master - and I ignored the SLA as not important - WRONG!

The jumper settings on this drive were both vertical (MASTER) and horizontal (CABLE SELECT, SLAVE). The six letters represented the six pins.

So finally, I correctly set the jumper pins put it all back together and it all worked. Plugging the USB cables back in made the problem come back - and then i realised that i had left a memory stick card in the USB card reader.

In conclusion: the problems was caused by invalid jumper settings and leaving a card in the card reader. Hope this helps some people.