Dual Boot: Where should I place the Jumpers on my Hard Drive(s)?

[Steady Teddy]

I have a Dual Boot system with two separate Hard Drives, running Win 98 (Maxtor 20 GB) and XP Pro (Seagate 80 GB).
But I'm not sure if my 98 drive should really be hooked up as a "slave" drive since it is directly hooked up (it is not connected to the XP Drive) to my Ultra ATA/100 Controller Card.
My XP Drive is directly hooked up as well.
If I'm going to make one of these Drives my "Master" hard Drive, of course it will be the XP Drive. But does it really make a difference if I set the jumpers on the Win 98 drive to "Master" or "Cable Select"?? Couldn't I just set the jumpers on BOTH Hard Drives to "Master" since they are operating independently?

Thanks in advance.

[HackinCowboy]

Since you're using ATA100 you'll want to set both to Cable Select. Then the order in which you place the drives on the cable will determine which will be master and which will be slave. The one on the very end of the cable is Master. You can't have two Masters on one cable. It really doesn't matter which is which. You can always edit the Boot.ini file to change the default OS. Boot.ini is the file that controls the OS boot menu.

[Steady Teddy]

But I don't have one cable for the hard drives. I have a seperate cable on each hard Drive connected to the ATA Controller.
The XP Drive is connected to slot #1 on the Controller and the 98 Drive is connected to slot #2. The ribbons for the two Hard Drives are not connected to one another.

[Alfie]

If you're using the 80 wire ribbon for both devices set the drives to CS(cable select)and install them at the end of the ribbon(black)this will make both devices as master(as they're independant of each other).
The master- slave comes into play when 2 devices are connected on the same ribbon.
It's the boot loader(menu) that offers the option of which system to boot first and not the configuration of drives.
How is it that you could set up a dual boot without having the devices configured?

[Steady Teddy]

Originally posted by Alfie How is it that you could set up a dual boot without having the devices configured?

I'm sorry for not giving more info in my original post.
First of all, I'm not the one who set up my Dual boot system. I had someone else do it. I had a Hard Drive Failure (it was a 75 GB IBM) and replaced it with the Seagate. I want to make sure the jumpers are correct on my drives.
Each Hard Drive has it's own 80 wire ribbon connected to the Controller. The Hard Drives are connected to each other by the Power Cable but not by the ribbon.
With my configuration, do I have to have to set the jumpers the same way on BOTH Hard Drives whether it be Cable Select or Master?

[Alfie]

If each device is on it's own controller and you're using 80 wire ribbons,set both devices to CS and connect the black end of ribbon to drive.
This will enable the udma protocol and will make each device as master.