IDE hard drive force to master mod

I bought a cheap used IDE drive on the bay for 7 bucks. Hooked it up to a usb adapter, it partitioned and formatted ntfs easily. I plug it in to a CF 50 and it isn't recognized in the bios and hence won't boot or work.
The drive is a 30 gig Toshiba MK3021GAS with a compaq part number on the bottom of the label. I know 30 gig but it was 7 bucks. I am poor, but have lots of time to experiment. I check the jumpers and there are none on it and that is supposed to be the master configuration. I try cable select and slave with the same results.
I get curious, thinking about the optical drive mod and wonder if this drive is hard wired for cable select. Compaq part number and all. After some research, I find that when you set IDE drives for cable select, it looks at pin 28 to see if it is grounded. If it is grounded, it is a master. If it is open, it is a slave.
I find the 44 pin connector pinout and see that the pins 26 and 30 are both grounds and are beside pin 28. I take a piece of wire and jumper pins 28 and 26.
I install the cable select jumper and plug it into one of my CF 50's. PRESTO the bios sees it as a master and I install XP and it boots perfectly.
I can't figure any other reason for this to work unless the drive is hardwired for cable select. If the board was bad, the drive would not have worked, even with my mod.

 

Now you have learned IDE's dirty little secret... and now you see why everyone wanted to go to SATA. Well, that, and the fact that the SATA form factor is specifically designed to be hot-swappable without a caddy.

mnem
Haveta run... kids in the oven and I gotta pick up the pizza.

 

I feel like grasshopper......

 

Well, in the old days, the spot where the ribbon cable had a twist in it would set master or slave; a holdover from the floopy drive days. Then they went to the flat ribbon with keyed jumper on the drives. With the high density cables, placing the plug on one side or the other of the ribbon would provide cable select similar to the old days.

mnem
De-cabled.

 

Ive installed a lot of laptop drives and I have yet to see one that did not come default as master (no jumpers installed) maybe the one you got was for a specialized dual drive application.

 

Yeh, it kinda surprised me too. I am not sure what the deal was, but it was from some Compaq, so anything is possible. My search for a solution led me to many other stories of people who had issues trying to re-use that model of hard drive. Maybe Compaq wanted to make it idiot proof.
Ha..I fooled them..God built a better idiot! (ME)