i have a problem with my hard disk and a cannot format it. it return a message "the disk is corrupted" or something like that.
so my friend suggest me to use my old hard disk from my old computer and make it as a master and my new hard disk as a slave. after that i want to try to backups or copy my file from the new hard disk to the old hard disk.

ok my problem is:

if i want to make my new hard disk as a slave. I have to set it to slave right. but i don't know which one is the slave. theres a four pins at the back of my hard disk(excluding the data & power cable) and i'm suppose set the jumper to one of them.

can anyone please help me to overcome this problem. any other suggestion regarding solving this problem is welcome. thanks.

Most drives have the jumper set to 'cable select' by default. If this is the case, the drive that's attached to the middle of the IDE cable is used as the slave, and the one attached to the end is the primary.
If you just want to change which disk you boot from, you can change that setting in the BIOS (usually accessed by pressing DELETE while your computer is first booting up). I forget whether you can boot from secondary disks, but I'm pretty sure you can. And always be careful when changing your BIOS settings. :)

Take a good look at the new hard disk. You should be able to find a jumper table telling you how to set the master/slave stuff. It should be on the metal cover or close to the actual jumpers. Look for abbrivations like MA (Master), CS(cable select), and SL(Slave).

Do the same thing for the old hard drive, too. Some drives have single/master on the same jumper setting, some drives have single and master on different jumper settings.

Unfortunately, most hard disks have the Diagram for Jumper settings in places that cannot be seen after you put the drive into the system.

If you remove the drives, you will see at least one diagram, probably two. One is usually on the circuit board and one is usually on the paper glued to the top of the disk (the latter has all sorts of other data about the disk).

Make sure that the master is at the end of the data cable.