Quote Originally Posted by ockham23
For the modern 80-conductor cable it's master at the end (black connector) and slave at the gray connector. The blue connector plugs into the motherboard.
This may well be true for many IDE cables that are now shipping, but it does bring out another point where there could be a problem. I have several IDE2 cables (80 wires) that do not meet this standard. I certainly expect there are other users out there also who have cables like mine. Yet using an 80 wire IDE cable was all you suggested (actually, worse than that, you advised using an 80 pin IDE cable) and that is not enough to make things work.
Quote Originally Posted by ockham23
Make also sure that you use an 80 pin IDE cable to connect your disk drives.
Unless something has happened that I've missed, all IDE connectors still have 40 pins, but the new type use an 80 wire cable. Stll, if users interpret your advice as I did to mean "use an IDE cable with 80 wires", they could still have problems unless they happen to have what you now call a "modern" IDE cable, as opposed to just having an IDE 2 cable. Yet "modern" is a vague and therefor confusing term, I thought modern and IDE 2 refered to the same thing until we started this discussion and I would have used the IDE 2 cable that came with my motherboard 5 years ago. But while it has 80 wires, it doesn't have the color coded black and grey connectors and I expect that it would not work for this purpose. Just another thing that can go wrong when you tell others to use cable select.

If you are happy with cable select and you know you are using all the correct modern cables, then fine, go ahead and use it. But master and slave simply works and is not dependent on someone's IDE 2 cable being "modern" (or being IDE 2 at all, as many users optical drive cables still are not). I still don't see any reason to advise someone already using master and slave and having problems to try to switch to CS when it can only complicate things. Nothing at all is gained over using CS rather than M/S setting. I would have just advised the user to check their drive jumpering and be sure that the drive they want to be first is jumpered master and the other is jumpered slave. You had them check both drives also, but make a change on each one, and then they had to have the right "modern" IDE 2 cable or they would really be messed up. And unless they knew how to position the drives on the cable so that the one they wanted was the master then they might end up wondering why the wrong drive tried booting first (or in the case of some BIOSs, only the wrong drive booted).