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> One thing I didn't see mentioned in TFA was that the 'master' (drive 0) MUST be located at the end of the cable.

If that's not proof that Stack Overflow has helped me learn arcana, I don't know what is. In fifteen-plus years of working with IDE drives, I never figured out this pattern and typically just fumbled jumpers into some combination of master, slave, or cable select until all of the drives worked.

Same, cable select was not worth messing with as it so rarely worked. Just set master/slave and be done with it. I agree with the other poster also that said CDROMS were the worst full stop.

> The jumpers were easy to figure out and not as complicated as the author makes out. Contrary to the experience that na85 had; "Cable Select" _never_ worked for me.

I think every drive I encountered that was manufactured after the early 90s either had a printed diagram for the jumpers somewhere on it, or else had labels molded right in to the plastic case around the pins themselves. Only time it was hard, back when I used to tinker with computers a lot, was when I'd be messing with a junked 286 or something. Further, by the late 90s IIRC drives had begun to converge on a standard jumper layout.