[Coco] Bad HD cable

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 04 August 2007, Paul Fitch wrote:
>> Message: 6
>> Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2007 17:58:36 +0930
>> From: "Briza" <bpa65117 at bigpond.net.au>
>> Subject: [Coco]  Drive freezing / data reovery (WAS: Re: Need to know
>> To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
>> Message-ID: <001201c7d671$73f9d5b0$e177b67c at tigers4zcxreqd>
>> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"
>>
>> Hi Joel.
>>
>> The drive still spins and is recognised in the BIOS. The
>> problem is the Boot track is gone. I have loaded up Linux and
>> had the drive plugged in and I could access the coco archive folders.
>>  So in the end it was just a simple faulty cable causing me
>> the grief. But still have not attempted to hook up both my
>> drives together yet. with my new boot disk as my Master, and
>> the crashed drive as a slave unit.
>>  The last time I tried them both together. The new drive
>> would not load up again. And at the time I used the faulty
>> cable. So I'm hoping this time with the new cable that it
>> will not corrupt the new boot drive.
>>
>> laters
>>
>> Briza
>
>Dude, I gota ask.  That IDE HD cable that you replaced. Was it a DRIVE
>SELECT cable?  Maybe both of your drives are set to MASTER or SLAVE?
>
>Newer system like to use drive select cables, and the drives are jumpered to
>know this.  Older or generic cables are NOT drive select and require the
>user (that's you) to maunally jumper your drives as Master or Slave.
>
>A drive select cable will generally have different colors for each of its
>two connectors.

And this is a good excuse for me to jump in and emphasize that in either cable 
style, the drive to be used as the master drive MUST be on the end of the 
cable as it does the scsi-like and _required_ termination.  Automatically, 
you don't see it, but its there.  The slave if used must then be on the 
middle connector since 'slaves' don't enable their terminations.  In no case 
can you put a master programmed drive on the middle connector and leave the 
surplus cable hanging in the breeze, its not a matter of if your data gets 
scrambled, but when, and its usually sooner than later.

Sitting here reading this thread, I'm wondering if that's what actually 
happened here.  Decent cabling, but miss-configured keeps raising the thought 
in my mind.  I have had a couple of really cheap cables go toes up, but more 
than likely in the one case I have right now, the chipset simply cannot 
handle two drives on the same cable, which is the case in the box that runs 
my milling machine.  I've had 3 drives and 3 cables in that box trying to 
make it handle two drives on cable 0, can't be done, both drives will get 
trashed in pretty short order.  Just one drive and its been fine for over a 
year.  EMC doesn't need the other 60GB of drive anyway.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I can't wait for EDLIN to be ported for Windows.