What happens if you have a slave drive with no master?

[Old Thrashbarg]

This should be a fairly quick and easy question. I have acquired a laptop that is missing the hard drive and accompanying special adapter cable. It has a CD drive in it, which shows up in BIOS as the IDE slave. The hard drive would be the master, if it were there.

When I put in a boot CD, it'll spin up and seem to be aware there's a CD there, but it won't actually boot from it, even with the CDROM set to the primary boot device. The only thing that comes up is 'Operating system not found.'

My question is, is that normal? I've been thinking about it, and I can't recall ever having encountered a situation where I had a slave drive and no master, so I really don't know how it would behave.

I just want to be reasonably confident that this thing works before I spend any money on getting the necessary parts to complete it.

 

[Know Nuttin]

It should work, I've booted up systems before without a master drive and just the optical drive set as slave. Perhaps the optical drive is defective?

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

Hm, that's kinda what I was afraid of, though a bad CD drive wouldn't be as bad as a dead IDE controller. Guess I'll have to dig up a spare slim CDROM and try it.

Edit: I tried several different CD drives. Probably the greatest percentage of them were bad drives to begin with, since the laptop components I have that aren't installed in laptops, were generally pulled out for a reason. So I don't know what behavior is a result of bad CD drives, and what is due to the laptop. But my findings are as such:

The drives I tried that used cable-select would all immediately pop up with 'Operating system not found.' They all showed up as Slave drives in BIOS.

I found two drives that appeared as Master. One of them I'm pretty sure was bad, but it did spend a few seconds trying to read the CD before popping up with 'Operating system not found.' The second one works and boots.

So that at very least tells me the onboard IDE controller is OK, which was the main thing I was worried about. I still don't know whether my problems are the result of the laptop's original CD drive being bad, or if it just doesn't like having no master drive set. But I can figure that out after I get a hard drive installed.