I will give you an example from my machine how this master/slave thing works. See the attached below and read on.
In the ata/atapi world there are connectors on the motherboard these connectors have 40 pins and are usually noted as ide connectors. Most computers have two ide connectors but some Macs will have more than two.
A CABLE connected to the ide connector can have one or two (total of three) connectors. So one or two devices can operate on a single ide connector on the mother board. It is important that if two devices are connected they do not have the same configuration set on both devices.
How do you know what a device is set to? Easy on the end of the hard drive (ata) or CD (atapi) between the data connector and power connector is a group of pins. Usually there are at least 3 pin sets. The first is marked M the second is marked S and the third is marked CS. M is master, S is slave and CS is cable select. In my opinion never use CS, this is where much grief has come from.
If you have a cable that is connected to an ide connector on the motherboard and you have only one other connector on that cable it does not matter for that bus how it is set. If there are two devices on that same cable one must be set to master and one must be set to slave.
In Carolyn's case (two ide's on motherboard and two ide's on pci card - I think) her two hard disks are alone on a connector so she may be just fine. But her cd drive (atapi device) is connected to some ide connector. If that cd is set to master and it shares a device set to master also everything will work great UNTIL she decides to use a cd then things will turn to mush, errors on the ide bus will occur. I actually know people who suffered with strange things like this for over a year an have just lived with it.
(sorry the file limit of 10k did not allow this picture and it bounced back)
Here is the system profiler from my machine. In this case the ata buses are called ATA-4 Bus and ATA-3 Bus. Don't ask me why Apple does this, I don't know. On the ATA-4 there are two hard drives one is set for master (note 1 partition) and the second is set for slave (two partitions) (everything is just fine). And I can boot from the MacOS922 or from the MacOSX. On the ATA-3 there is only one device, a CD RW device. The CD is set to master so there is no conflict on either bus.
If I installed a hard disk set to master on the ATA-3 bus trouble would arise when I tried to use the CD. And most people would think my CD has broken. You take this to a repair shop and they MAY look at the conflict and see this as an opportunity to sell you a new CD with labor to replace that bad CD (not really bad).
I hope this helps, I may have made some terminology mistakes but I think you get the idea. This does not solve all possible problems but it may help some of you.
On Jan 6, 2004, at 9:23 AM, Andrew Nye wrote:
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