Okay now here is the strange part.

When I replace the old ribbon cable with the ATA-100 cable (blue plug
to the mobo, black plug to the hd) it can no longer see the master
boot record even though the bios still detects the drive correctly
except this time it says the UDMA modes 3-5 are can be used.

So with the new cable installed it thinks the HD is a virgin,
unpartitioned drive. I tried this with the jumpers on the drive set
for single master and cable select. No change.

Then when I reinstalled the old ribbon cable the MBR and partition
info reappeared and the system boots without problems.

Does anybody know what is going on here? It looks like when the
ATA100 cable is used it is looking for the master boot record in a
different location than with the ATA 33 ribbon cable.


While it is not suspose to make any differance, is the Master drive on the
very end of the cable ? I have seen sometimes that unless the master is on
the end you can get odd results.