Cable Select vs. Master/slave settings

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 07 August 2005 13:29, Claude Jones wrote:
>On Sun August 7 2005 1:06 pm, Jim Cornette wrote:
>> Just reporting something that came up in postings earlier
>> regarding cable select settings vs. setting the jumpers on the
>> devices, I tried cable select on my drives because I wanted to
>> swap the primary CDROM with the Secondary DVD burner. The jumpers
>> set to master / slave worked fine when the CDROM which is on the
>> secondary of the cable select cable. The CDROM was set to master,
>> While the DVD was on the master of the cable select cable.
>> When I changed the DVD to master and set the CDROM to slave. both
>> set to the same position on the cable select cable, the devices dd
>> not become recognized correctly. (CDROM on secondary, DVD on
>> primary) Changing the devices to both cable select allowed the DVD
>> to be master and the CDROM burner to be slave as desired.
>>
>> This is sort of a retraction and a note that jumper selection
>> settings on a cable select IDE cable can cause trouble, primarily
>> with the secondary connector on the cable selectable IDE cable.
>
>I see all sorts of declarative statements on this subject, here, and
> they are generally wrong. One thing I do in my job is hardware
> maintenance for a large collection of PC's of varying vintage, and
> with many different configurations. I've messed with bad
> jumper/cable select settings for years. The thing that can really
> bite you, because it's easy to forget/overlook is the following
> scenario: it is possible to get a system to work with a cable
> select cable, and the devices jumpered master/slave, or one
> jumpered master or slave and the other jumpered cable select - it's
> unpredictable, but when it works, it just seems to, well..., work.
> Scroll forward six months or a year, and you or someone else has to
> replace one of the devices; it's easy to waste a lot of time
> because you don't know, or have forgotten, that the system is
> configured improperly, and with the new device, things don't just,
> well...., work. If you have a cable select cable, jumper your
> devices "cs" - if you have a standard non-cs cable, jumper your
> devices master/slave. Follow this convention, and you won't have
> problems - I'd be willing to bet that everyone who's declared that
> you should ignore these protocols, and always jumper master/slave,
> or some other variation on this argument, have simply been lucky -
> they are victims  who just haven't been bit, ............., yet!
>
>--
>Claude Jones
>Bluemont, VA, USA

Nice idea Claude, but can you tell us how to tell the difference 
between the cables so that we can properly identify them?

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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