What is cable select versus master/slave. Does the drive just work as whatever part of the ide cable it is on (master or slave, so I don't have to bother with it?) My mom's new dell has both the dvdrom and cdrw on the same ide cable with cable select on both. Does this make them faster, or is it just easier to assemble this way?
And I've heard that the beginning of the drive is the fastest at accessing data. Since it is a constant rpm (unlike a cd), it makes me think of a record. The guy said it is because there is a shorter track near the beginning. But how would that make a difference? If you draw a line from the center of a record to the edge, and turn it on, each part of the record makes one revolution in the same amount of time, as well as the analog audio, which is on it. And if I am correct, if you have a hard drive with 60 gigs and it's radius is about 2 inches (don't know what it really is) then the first inch of that hard drive is 60 gigs, as well as the second inch. Right? or wrong?

I recently repartitioned, and made linux my first parition and xp my second. So is linux on the beggining, therefore faster part of the drive?

I'm also having trouble getting xp loader to load grub to load linux. My windows drive isn't until f (it counts c as my ext3 and d as my cdrom drive and e as my linux swap) so i did
su
dd if=/dev/hda1 [my /] of=/mnt/dosf/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
(I have dosf mounted in fstab an it is vfat, so no writing problems there)

my boot.ini in xp is:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=F:\linux.bin
[operating systems]
F:\linux.bin="Red Hat Linux 9"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" \/fastdetect

Which is right, no?

Thanks a lot.

Cable Select i.e CS is an automatic method for configuring IDE drives as master/slave. If the jumper is set for CS and you connect the drive to the black conector of the ribbon cable it will be a master and if you connect it to the grey connector it will be a slave. If you do not have an IDE ribbon cable that supports CS then you will need to set the jumpers for either master or slave on the drive.

As for as the bootloader... Did you install lilo or grub to your hda1? If so then it should work.

(grub). I found the problem was that even though when I booted up xp and my partition was f and not c, I had to specify c because aparently it didn't know until booted that c was really f. Thanks about the CS.

Do you know about the second question about speed?

Unlike a record when you are dealing with hard disks you need to take into account the physical sectors on the disks. As there is more space on the outside of the disk there will be more sectors on that cylinder. The greater number of sectors moving under the head at in a given time = a faster area of the disk.

In reality you'll probably never notice a difference, but that's the theory as I understand it. Not all drives have a different number of sectors per cylinder. Its been a while since I read up on this so feel free to correct me people.

cheers

Jamie...

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk3.htm may help went thinking about why some cylinders can have more space than others.

cheers

Jamie...