I've built several PC's and always made DVD/CD drive one Master and the other Slave when I have them daisy-chained on an IDE bus.Today, I had to purchase a replacement DVD drive for a Dell machine that she had purchased some time ago. Both the existing (good) drive and the one that I replaced were in CS mode. I made the replacement DVD RW drive also CS, so as not to cause any other issues.Are there special IDE cables for CS? What advantage is there to configuring drives like this? This is not the first proprietary machine I've seen with CS CD/DVD drives. Is there any advantage to reconfiguring the drives to MS/SL, and would this need a new IDE cable?Thanks, the one drive I re0placed appears to work, other than it won't invoke the application referenced by the .inf file on a CD.Bruce.

On cable select, theres no new cables. I believe the outer IDE plug is slave and the inner one is master. This works well unless you are in my position where that config is not ideal. My burner is above my CD-ROM so if they were both in CS, my CD-ROM would be master and my burner slaved (opposite of what I want). So I gotta manually configure the burner as master and CD-ROM as slave.I didn't want to take a pic of a IDE cable, so I made one up in CAD LOL.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/52796.gif

Here's probably much more than you ever wanted to know! - http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCS-c.htmlW. Sieffert

Thanks guys. Bruce.