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
