Refresher on Slave Drives and booting

[Shadowrunner]

Figured I'd post this here too, because BG are geniuses.

I need a refresher.

I have 4 HDDs inside my computer, that I just brought over from the states. 3 are SATA, with my oldest one being IDE (it turned into my main OS HDD after my SDD died).

After hooking the rig back up yesterday and getting my hands on powering the beast, i'm getting NTLDR fun. So it's not seeing the boot drive, I took a look at the BIOS to see what we're looking at in terms of recognizing if the drives were there, or had I simply destroyed them all on the long trip.

All drives are visible, but the OS drive, the only one on the IDE is showing as a Slave drive. Took a look at the back, and there's no jumper, so it's configured to be a slave drive. I took a look at the boot order however and the IDE drive is the top of the list for booting.

So before I hunt down a W7 iso (I don't have an optical drive, but I have my cd!) to try and repair the poor thing, I just want to make sure I'm not crazy in thinking that regardless of Master/Slave settings, the computer should still boot from the HDD if it recognizes that it has a boot sector. Or am I wrong, and because it is in slave it's skipping the HDD when looking at boot sectors.

[Isiolia]

If you only have one drive on an IDE channel, it should be set to Master. Far as I know it might work anyway, but no guarantee, and it shouldn't be hard to change. Some drives have Single settings as well. Simplest thing is to set it to Cable Select and plug it in the end of the cable.

[xopher]

You can set a SATA order in the BIOS typically and that forces which drive to boot from. Also "NTLDR is missing" is an easy fix. People even make boot discs specifically for that problem. A little googling and I'm sure you can find one.