Hard drive cable question -

[Mike McCarty]

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
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