bobgoodwin wrote:
Does it matter which forty pin connector plugs into the master and slave drives? I have come to the realization after struggling with some problems that there are a lot more wires in the ribbon cable than there are connector pins.
If you have more wires than pins, you almost surely have a CABLE SELECT cable. In fact, if your cable is less than five years old, you probably have CS. Which end goes where depends on how you jumper your hard drives.
I now see that Maxtor designates the connector at the end of the cable as the "master" and the one just below it as the "slave." I presently have only one drive jumpered as master with FC4 running on it and it
If you use M/S jumpering on the drives, then in theory it doesn't matter where you connect them.
;doesn't seem to care which data cable connector is attached to it, but when I put in the second drive, jumpered as "slave" the computer won't boot. I decided the drive was bad but now I'm wondering? It may be the wrong connectors plugged into the drives.
I thought "cable select" cables had wires obviously crossed in the ribbon cable but that may not be true with this 80 wire ribbon?
Not crossed. For CS, the drives have resistive pull-ups on them. The MB pulls down one line. The wire to this line is *severed* as the slave connector, so the "master" sees a high, while the "slave" sees a low on this pin. (The MB may have a pull-up and the drives a pull-down, I forget the polarity.)
Floppies have a "twist" in their cables, not hard drives.
Can someone clear this up for me.
HTH
Mike