Question about ATA66 Channel Assignments

[jmillernj]

I just cloned my original hard drive to a new drive. Each drive is set to cable select and is connected at the end of individual 80 wire cables to the two ports of a Promise ATA66 controller card. The middle cable connectors are unused.

When I did the copy, the old drive was detected by the BIOS as channel D0 and the new drive as D3. When I finished the clone operation, I hid the O/S partition of the old drive and simply swapped cables at the controller end. I expected that the new drive would become D0 and the old, D3.

However, what I found was that the new Drive became D1 and the old became D2. The system and both drives are working fine, there are no apparent problems, but I am totally puzzled as to why I got D1/D2 instead of the original D0/D3. I thought the channels were simply a function of controller port and cable position. Can anyone explain this unexpected result?

 

[Nic]

As far as I know, the channels are as you say, a function of the controller and cable position. Windows 2k/xp can cause strange things to happen with drive letters and booting, but it should have no effect on channel positions as that is physical (I could be wrong). Maybe you're just a little confused as to what actually happened and missed something. I'm not saying that's the case, but what you have described just doesn't make any sense to me either.

 

[jmillernj]

Thanks, but actually, the channel numbers are reported by the bios and it doesn't have anything to do with the O/S (I actually have a dual boot system with both 98 and 2K partitions on both drives, although I hid the old partitions).