At 11:50 AM 09/12/2000, you wrote:
>Hello Bob,
>
>I am very  curious what does the Cable Select position do, anyways? It's
>on all hard drives, but I've never seen it used - until yesterday when I
>was helping a friend install a new CD burner. He has a fairly recent Dell
>computer with Pentium II (?) and it had a CD ROM drive in it, and it was
>set to the Cable Select position. I've never seen it used like that, so I
>just left it set as Cable select, and put in the new HP burner as the
>default of slave. I booted it up, and it worked. Both drives were
>recognized and functioned fine.
>
>So, again, what is the purpose of the Cable Select position?


Cable Select was based on the idea that depending upon which
connector you attached to the drive, it would determine which
position the drive would occupy.  When you set the jumper
on a drive to CLS or Cable Select, the drive is sort of in "neutral"
waiting for the PC to determine it's position as Master or Slave.

A special cable was provided with connectors marked Master and
Slave.  The Bios and onboard ATA/IDE controller had special programming
to utilize this concept.  It was used in some earlier Compaq and Dell
computers.  The idea never caught on like many ideas in the PC
world of hardware...   and it died off...

It is very much like the floppy drive ribbon cable, the connector with
the twist is always the floppy boot drive or drive 'A.'  The same principle
is involved here.

    Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group

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