Baslinux mailing list

[Matrix Mole <matrixm AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> Can you explain what "cable select" is all about?  We find it on the hard
> drives and ignore it.

>From what I understood about cable select, it allows the bios to determine
where the hard drive should be considered to physically be located based
upon where the cable was plugged into. For example, two drives, one pluged
into primary IDE controller, other on secondary controller, the BIOS will
place the primary drive in hda and secondary controller drive as hdb (or
drice C: and D: if in DOS). Once you add a slave drive to the asme
controller, the BIOS can determine which drive is supposed to be master
and slave for you. IIRC, the drive on the terminating end of the IDE cable
is considered the master automatically. Personally, I find it easier to
justuse the jumpers to determine which drive is master/slave myself. This
is the first I've heard of using cable select to let BIOS figure out which
drive to boot from. That would be interesting to see, as it would remove
the necessity of boot managers.

> I was planning to use the DOS drive to boot with, since I will be using
> DOS for translation work (can't find a non-gui linux wordprocessor), and
> then use loadlin to boot linux from the second drive (and use linux for
> anything online, and to view pdf files).  Maybe some day I can get dosemu
> running and then worry about boot managers.  Could I then boot from the
> second (linux) drive with a boot manager?

You would have to have some form of boot "program" for the second drive.
The currently most popular is LiLo of course, but it's tricky to get setup
and working properly. There are other boot loaders out there but I don't
know any of them off the top of my head.

-- 
Matrix Mole
matrixm AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org