Well, usually you do nothing. When the system boots, presuming you have all the IDEs set to 'auto', it examines your drive and then selects the highest ATA interface that both your IDE controller and the hard disk support.
However, if they aren't matched, say the hard disk was ATA-100 and the controller was ATA-33, it will be set to ATA-33. You haven't mentioned what kind of IDE controller/motherboard you're using or the type of hard disk, but I would guess this is what is happening.
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What does this button do?
One thing to add, if you have 2 devices sharing the same IDE cable (master & slave), say an ATA-33 CD-ROM and an ATA-100 hard disk, again the controller will default to the highest that *both* support, so your hard disk will be reduced to running at ATA-33 also.
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What does this button do?
To enable ATA100 you also need to be using an 80 wire IDE cable. It will look like the standard 40 wire cable (same 40 pin connectors) but it has twice as many wires. My Western Digital HD shipped with the 80 wire cable and the instructions said it had to be used for ATA100 to work. The cables are cheap and available almost anywhere.
When you have a drive that supports Ultra ATA speeds (66, 100, 133) you should jumper the drive to CS (Cable Select) and you must use a 80 pin cable. A 80-conductor cable is easily identified by the blue, gray, and black connector. In a CS configuration make sure that the Master drive is connected to the "Black" connector and the Slave drive on the "Gray".
Note: Do not ever jumper the drive as Master and connect it to the gray connector on a 80-conductor cable, leaving the black connector without a drive connected to it. This will create an "Antenna" effect and reduce the drive's performance severely.
Make sure in the OS that the transfer speeds of the drive is at UDMA speed and not in PIO.
My Hdd (WD800JB) was in ATA-66 mode. I downloaded the floppy software from western-digital, and through it set the Speed to ATA-100.
unfortunately the software only works with WD HDD's
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