Slave Settings Trouble

[Prez1210]

Hi,
I have a hughes Directv Tivo and I purchased the PTVnet and Instant Cake. As I understand the instructions the CD-Rom drive should be set as SLAVE on the primary IDE and the new hard Drive set as master on the secondary IDE channel. I have tried this on 2 different systems and I am unable to boot with the CD-Rom jumpered to slave (on one machine the CD-Rom drive doesn't even show up as an option when set to slave). I was under the impression that you couldn't set a drive to slave if there is no master drive on the same channel. I tried setting the CD-Rom to master and I was able to boot from the PTVnet disk.

I've searched the forums and no one else seems to be having this problem. Will the software install correctly with the CD-Rom set to master on the primary IDE and if I choose the correct CD-Rom connection setting when prompted by the software?

Thanks.

[Rick Travis]

Hi,
I have a hughes Directv Tivo and I purchased the PTVnet and Instant Cake. As I understand the instructions the CD-Rom drive should be set as SLAVE on the primary IDE and the new hard Drive set as master on the secondary IDE channel. I have tried this on 2 different systems and I am unable to boot with the CD-Rom jumpered to slave (on one machine the CD-Rom drive doesn't even show up as an option when set to slave). I was under the impression that you couldn't set a drive to slave if there is no master drive on the same channel. I tried setting the CD-Rom to master and I was able to boot from the PTVnet disk.

I've searched the forums and no one else seems to be having this problem. Will the software install correctly with the CD-Rom set to master on the primary IDE and if I choose the correct CD-Rom connection setting when prompted by the software?

Thanks. Did you set the drive as bootable in the system bios and set it as the first choice to boot. You usually press delete when machine is powering up. It normally tells you on the first screen. Hope this helps.:)

[Prez1210]

Did you set the drive as bootable in the system bios and set it as the first choice to boot. You usually press delete when machine is powering up. It normally tells you on the first screen. Hope this helps.:)

Thanks for the quick response.

Yes, I set the cd-rom drive as the first device in the BIOS and it didn't work. As soon as I changed the drive 's jumper to master it booted fine.

I guess I'll try the installation with the cd-rom set to master.

[prausa]

I don't know how helpful this will be since it's probably not an officially sanctioned workaround, but I have a old Dell Dimension 8100 (which I literally blew the dust off of to use) that also wouldn't boot with the CD-ROM drive jumped as the slave (on the primary IDE line). I do, however, have another CD-ROM drive, so I put them both on the primary IDE and jumped them appropriately for master and slave (my intended TiVo drive, a 120GB WD, was on the secondary IDE jumped as the master as recommended).

To get Instantcake to work, I booted with the CD in the 'master' drive and let the linux stuff initialize up to the point where the installation gets to the 'Just hit enter' part. I've seen several threads where people who continue past this point get an error saying the installation can't find 'PTVbake' and the prevailing opinion was that Instantcake was looking for the CD-ROM on the slave, and therefore failing (since many of us Dell users can't boot at all with the CD-ROM as the slave, so just to get to this point we had to jump it as the master). I also had a problem with the boot disk, but I found some advice in this forum to slow the burn speed which seemed to work, so that was good advice, too.

So the very simple work around was: Boot with two CD-ROMs (one master, one slave, as described above), get to the 'just hit enter' screen, move the disc to the 'slave' CD-ROM and hit enter as directed. Everything else went perfect...

Obviously not everyone will have two CD-ROM drives, but for those of us with what seems like a Dell-specific problem, this was a pretty simple fix. Borrow a second CD-ROM from a neighbor, or someone at work (or 'borrow' the one from your work computer - just kidding, don't do that).

Hope this helps...