BIOS and dual HDD setup

So, I've got two hard drives hanging out here. One's a 1000GB SATA drive and the other is an old-school 320GB ATA drive.
I'm using an ATA/SATA adapter to get that SATA one talking to my motherboard.
When I fire this thing up, the boot sequence looks something like this in the memory readout:

Master 0 HDD 1000 (that's where Windows lives)
Slave 0
Master 1
Slave 1

Master 2 HDD 320
Slave 2 CD ROM
Master 3
Slave 3

But here’s the kicker—everything went sideways right after a Windows update 🙄! Once the updates finished downloading, I shut down the PC, and then—bam! Everything's totally messed up. Now the drives aren't showing up as masters anymore; they're all stuck on slave. What even happened?!
First big question: how am I even supposed to change these settings back? :/
I checked the BIOS under standard features, but there isn't any option to manually set or swap between master and slave... it just shows AUTO or none.

I don't have the exact specs for that IDE/SATA adapter handy, but with those old PATA drives, you usually set the MA, CS, and SL settings using physical jumpers rather than messing with the BIOS.
So, which motherboard are we actually working with here? And how many total drives are you trying to run?

wearymason4 said:I don't have the exact specs for that IDE/SATA adapter, but usually with those old PATA drives, you set the MA, CS, and SL settings using jumpers on the drive itself rather than messing with the BIOS.
So, what kind of motherboard are we actually looking at here? And how many total drives are you trying to run?

Yeah, so the tech guy at the repair shop set up all the jumpers (or whatever they call them!) for me, but I still ran into some headaches with the BIOS at first. I had to fiddle with the settings just to get it to boot from the newer drive—it's got Windows on the 320GB one too!

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M78L-US2H (AMD 760G chipset)
My bad, I misspoke earlier—the ATA drive is hooked up via an adapter because the board is SATA-only!

Two hard drives total (a 1TB and a 320GB), and I've got four partitions on each of them.

That motherboard features five SATA ports plus an IDE connector that can handle two IDE drives (or one hard drive and a CD/DVD drive).
No need to mess around with adapters either; you just jump into the BIOS and set your boot order if you've got operating systems on both.

Thanks! And get this—one of those 1000GB drives just completely stopped being recognized. Like, totally dead to the system. What are the odds, right? How does that even happen in just two days?! It’s such a headache... especially since my entire OS is sitting right on that drive. I've got an older one acting as a backup for my documents, but man, this is frustrating!

So, basically, it’s only picking up the older drive that doesn't even have an OS on it yet.