cable select vs master/slave

Cable select determines the master/slave by which connection the drive is connected on via the IDE cable.  The drive on the end of the cable is MASTER, the one on the middle connector is the SLAVE. 

So you deterime which is MA/SL by where it is connected on the cable.

You can manually jumper the drives, but there is NO ADVANTAGE to do so

The advantage of switching to master/slave is the ability to use the disc cloning feature of Norton Ghost. I’m aware that I can jumper the setting. What I don’t know is if the system as a whole would be affected deleteriously by doing so.

According to Ghost’s documentation it needs to be master/slave and not cable select. When I tried it with cable select, Ghost hung.

There is no advantage, nor any ill effect. As long as the cable is cable select, Ghost will work fine with the drives jumpered that way.

The only way you can run into trouble is by jumpering master-slave and installing to the wrong connector (i.e., jumper master and put on slave position).

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@foobardv wrote:

According to Ghost’s documentation it needs to be master/slave and not cable select. When I tried it with cable select, Ghost hung.

No, that's not correct.  As previously stated, setting them to Cable Select will work fine.  I've cloned my drives many times with Ghost.

As I said, when I ran Ghost with the drives configured with cable select, it hung. My version of Ghost is 9.0. Did you use the same version? Besides, as I said, the Ghost documentation explicitly states that the drives must be configured as master/slave. I assume they know their own product.

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@foobardv wrote:
As I said, when I ran Ghost with the drives configured with cable select, it hung. My version of Ghost is 9.0. Did you use the same version? Besides, as I said, the Ghost documentation explicitly states that the drives must be configured as master/slave. I assume they know their own product.

 

9.0 is the latest, I did it on prior versions.  I have 9.0, but haven't cloned with it.  Dell computers are designed for cable select.  I suspect either you have a setting wrong or because 9.0 is a mix of Ghost and Drive Image that there is a new incompatibility.