I have an 80 gig sata laptop drive in my ubuntu desktop. I didn't have any
spare drives except for that one and since ubuntu was just an experiment in
the desktop, I figured it would only be in there temporarily. Everything
worked great. I had one small problem with the sound, but a little typing to
edit a file, and that problem went away.

I brought home a 40gig IDE drive from the shop today and thought I would
just use a copy program to load ubuntu on it, so I could get my spare laptop
drive back.

It is a WD, so I pulled the jumper for single drive and stuck it in the
primary IDE connector. Bios said there were no drives at all.

I tried putting the slave jumper in with the same results.

I plugged it into the secondary port with same results.

Single drive, master, slave, primary, secondary. Same.

Each drive works perfectly alone.

Maybe the bios is too old.

I decided to start over and install 8.10 on the 40gig. I remember what I did
to get the sound to work. I may not need to do that with 8.10. It is just
another piece of the puzzle.

It is great that you had no problems. I think I can live with this, but I'm
mostly just curious.

The main thing is that now I have my spare laptop drive back and I have a
drive that can stay in my ubuntu box permanently.