On Sat, 28 Jun 2003 22:25:04 -0400, Robert Heller wrote:
<snip>
> I don't believe the IDE interfaces allow you to have slaves without
> masters -- you can have masters without slaves.
<snip>

I think this may depend on the particular hardware and bios. I have
my two HDDs as Master/Slave on a Promise UDMA 66 add-on card.
If I unplug the master, the bios will (after a timeout) boot from
the slave.

I notice that some HDDs have one jumper position for both Single
drive or Master in a Master/Slave configuration, whereas others
have separate jumper positions for these two cases. This may
make a difference.

Because of flaky behavior of my particular (Phoenix) bios
when all 4 onboard IDE slots are filled, I moved an ATAPI ZIP drive
to the secondary channel of the Promise card. I neglected to change
the ZIP drive jumper from slave to master when I did this but the
drive worked fine as slave even though there was no master on that
channel.