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Jumpers on old HDD

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First post, by Kouwes

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I wanted to test a very old harddisk but I can‘t really figure out how to set the jumpers. I did find the manual but that’s don‘t help me much.
It‘s a Seagate ST-157A with 45MB. No idea if it still works but it does spin up.
So from what I understand I need to close pin 1-2 if this would be the only IDE drive? And also close 3-4 if I connect a CD-ROM drive at the same cable?
And what about the HDD activity LED? When I use the pins on the mainboard should I close 5-6?

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Reply 1 of 3, by konc

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Kouwes wrote on 2023-10-26, 15:22:

So from what I understand I need to close pin 1-2 if this would be the only IDE drive? And also close 3-4 if I connect a CD-ROM drive at the same cable?

Yes exactly, it's clear in the doc you provided. Maybe it bothers you that the drive has a different configuration for single drive and master, but it's not that uncommon.

Reply 2 of 3, by st31276a

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Master has to know if slave is present, it performs certain functions with regards to the host (*) if a slave is also on the channel. Newer drives can detect slave presence, older ones (before cable select) use the jumper for that.

(*) IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) started out as mimicing the hardware of a ST506/412 controller to remain compatible with bios and dos. Those mfm controllers were a single controller board with drives 0 and 1 attached to it. The master IDE drive needs to fake this concept in the presence of a slave drive with its own controller on board.

Reply 3 of 3, by BitWrangler

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Personal experience from back in the day was that seagates under about 250MB in size do not play well with ATAPI CDROMs. You need the dual drive setting to use with CDROM. Some other pre 1995 drives also like it if you set master and the slave present if there is another device on the cable.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

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