On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 17:48 -0600, Jeff Vian wrote: > I have seen some errors generated by having the drives misjumpered on > a cable select cable (almost all IDE cables of the ultra type are > cable select - with 3 different colored connectors). > Those cables are designed to have the master on the end connector > (black) and the slave on the center connector (gray). Jumpering them > otherwise can cause errors. Only if you have a seriously fucked up hard drive. And if that's the case, what else is badly designed in your drive that might cause you problems? There is nothing in the specs that say you must use drives in cable select mode if you use a cable select cable. You *can* opt to jumper your drives as cable select, and let the cable set one drive as master and the other as slave. Conversely, you can opt to jumper your drives as master and slave, and it doesn't matter whether you connect the drives to the master or slave connectors. All those connectors do is open and short a pin on each drive, just the same as putting in jumpers on the extra header does. The use, or removal, of master/slave/cable select jumpers on the drive set the mode that the drive is in (the master jumper sets the drive as master, slave jumper sets the drive as slave, the cable select jumper sets it to use cable select). The drive doesn't use cable select unless jumpered to. The only thing that you must do with the 80-wire cables is plug the host end into the host. That end is where the extra 40 wires are grounded, it needs doing at the host end (motherboard, or card). It's good practice to only use the connectors at the end of the cable if you don't have two drives (i.e. skip the middle connector, rather than leave the end connector disconnected). -- (Currently testing FC5, but still running FC4, if that's important.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
