Re: Whcih drive is which on IDE cable?

IDE drives on the same ribbon cable jumpered as Master/Slave can be attached to either of the connectors on the cable. Simply look at the jumpers on the back of the drive and remove the one that's jumpered as the Slave, unless you would happen to have the OS installed on it, which then you would remove the Master.
If they were to be jumpered as Cable Select then they would each need to be connected to the proper connector of a Cable Select cable. Cable Select uses a special cable that uses a CSEL signal by grounding pin 28 to the IDE controller on the motherboard and the wire for pin 28 only goes to the middle connector.
When a drive is connected to the middle connector on the CSEL cable, it identifies the CSEL grounded signal ( 0 value ) and configures the drive as the Master. A drive connected to the end connector of the CSEL cable does not have the grounded pin 28 wire in the connector so it doesn't receive the CSEL signal, the drive identifies it as a non-connection and configures it as the Slave drive.
If you swap the drives between the connectors on the CSEL cable, the drives Master/Slave configuration will swap on the drives as well. With CSEL cable the middle is always the Master and the End is always the Slave, doesn't matter or care if only one drive or two drives are connected.

--

Brian A. Sesko { MS MVP_Shell/User }
Conflicts start where information lacks.
http://basconotw.mvps.org/

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"Gordon" <gorsoft@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1187009328.071977.152970@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I have 2 identical (same make, model and size) hard disk drives on my
primary IDE channel - one master and one slave. I think I have worked
out that the C:drive is Disk 0 and the D:drive is disk 1. I want to
replace the D: drive but when I come to open the PC case, how do I
tell which is the D:drive?

I suppose I could determine this by trial and error (50:50 chance) but
I thought there must be a way of getting this right first time.

Thanks

Gordon


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