Linea Recta wrote:
I bought a cheap replacement for my dying system drive, in my old PC.
New drive is refurbished WD1600AWS. (SATA)
But before I start tinkering: I can't find any informatio about the
master/slave settings?

Got the feeling I'm a little behind with new developments...

The drive itself has a "private" one-to-one cable.
There is no Master or Slave notation at the drive level.
The cable is not shared, as a ribbon cable is.

The *controller* on the motherboard, in the Southbridge,
has an IDE emulation mode. It maps up to four SATA
drives, to INT 14 and INT 15, at particular I/O space
addresses. This allows Windows 98 to be installed on
a SATA computer, as if there were two ribbon cables
and four IDE drives. Win98 is fooled into thinking
those four SATA drives, are on ribbon cables.

In the process of supporting such a mode, the *BIOS*
will have labels on the screen, of Master and Slave,
but they carry the same weight as having SATA port
numbers 0,1,2,3,4,5. They're a form of enumeration,
not a functional difference.

You have nothing to worry about. While you may see
the word "Master" or "Slave" on the screen, it
basically means nothing. And there is no jumper to set.

Jumpers exist on SATA drives for:

1) Force150 (make your drive work with a VIA 8237)
2) SpreadSpectrum (make your drive work with an older Macintosh)

Check the disk drive manufacturer site, for additional
jumper definitions. Those two would be popular on a
Seagate drive.

*******

Via a Port Multiplier box, it is possible to host
five drives off one SATA Southbridge port. But
I'm not aware what labeling scheme the software
uses, if you do that. And how the drives get
addressed. The Port Multiplier address field
in the SATA protocol, probably supports up to
15 disks off a single SATA cable, but no hardware
maker makes a chip using the entire space. Instead,
a chip exists with a fan-out of five SATA drives.

The notion of Master/Slave won't mean anything, in
a situation like this.

https://www.sata-io.org/port-multipliers

This shows a port multiplier box, with five output
cables (red), fed by a [not shown] cable plugged
into the shiny bottom connector housing.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/aAzWE.jpg

Paul