Re: [tlug] Help: unrecognized disk

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2007-11-29 14:45 -0700 (Thu), David J Iannucci wrote:

>    The main drive seems to be set to something called "cable select"
>    or something. I don't know what this means so I change it to the
>    one that means "I'm the only drive in this machine".

Unfortunately, there is no such setting.

With parallel ATA, both of the drives on a single cable use one
controller, and it will be in one drive or the other. (This can lead to
incompatabilities in and of itself.) The one that is the "master" will
be the one whose controller you're using; the one that's a "slave" will
be the one whose controller you're not using. If you have zero or two
active controllers, you'll have troubles, of course.

So that's the master/slave thing. There's also a little twist in part
of the IDE cable, such that each drive gets slightly different signals.
That's what "cable select" is all about; in theory, if you set both
drives to cable select, and you've got a cable that supports this,
they'll automatically do master and slave settings. (This is not "smart"
in any way; the drive on one connector will always be master and the
other slave, and swapping the two would swap the roles.)

I hope this was illuminating. If not entirely, I'll summarize the lesson
in two words: "use SATA." :-)

(And you don't even want to know about SCSI.)

cjs
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Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
Starling Software     <office-admin@example.com>
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