Cable select

Often abbreviated as CS, cable select is a disk drive jumper setting that will allow a cable select compatible cable to determine what drive is the master and slave based off where the drives are connected to the cable. For cable select to work, IDE/EIDE drives must have their jumpers set to CS and be connected to a cable that supports cable select.

Jumpers on back of IDE hard disk drive

Users can easily identify if the flat ribbon cable supports cable select by examining the cable for any of the below characteristics.

  1. Cable is an 80-connector UltraATA cable.
  2. Cable has master and slave printed on the cable or on the cable connectors.

Tip If you're having difficulties getting a drive to be detected in cable select mode we suggest setting one drive to Master and the other to Slave, instead of using cable select. If the drive is still not detected with CS or set as Master or Slave it's likely the drive is bad.

Also see: CD-ROM definitions, DS, Hard disk drive definitions, Jumper, Master, Slave