[Coco] Drive freezing / data reovery (WAS: Re: Need to know

[Briza]

Hi Gene.

You mentioned this in your last post.

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.

Well I have to say your right. I never realised it. But my Master was in the Middle of the cable. And my old Win98se drive was on the end cable. No wonder sometimes the Win98se would bootup and ignore the Master drive(XP, As it was in the middle). So this and the faulty cable would surely do as you say. And start to slowly corrupt the Boot track on my XP drive.
 So when I hook up both drives again. The Master drive will be on the End. And the Slave will be in the middle. This should stop the slow corruption process.

 Also to the Fellow coconut who mentioned. Is the IDE cable a DRIVE SELECT CABLE. Not by the looks of it. Looks standard to me. Also both drives were jumpered. XP(Master), Win98se(Slave).

laters

Briza