Different Ribbon Cables!!

[hungurr]

Hi,


I am a newbie.

I have a 1.7GHZ Athlon system, blah, blah, blah. The power supply is 300W.

My problem is whenever I connect the ribbon cable from the IDE connector on the motherboard to the hard drive, the hard drive stops spinning. And, the power lights on the other devices(CD-RW, DVD) go out. Also, there is a constant green light lit on my motherboard. It's not flashing.(Is that a good thing?) My hard drive requires that I use a 40-pin UDMA cable. The hard drive is a Maxtor 40 GB IDE Ultra ATA/100. I saw a pic of a UDMA cable, and the connectors are blue, gray, and black. The connectors on the ribbon cable I'm using are all black, but they fit. Is this cable the same as the UDMA cable? Does it really make a difference what kind of ribbon cable I use?

Also, it is possible for a motherboard to be partially-grounded? My computer turns on and the heatsink fan whirls, so I'm guessing that the motherboard isn't grounded.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Sid

[dead_eye]

You might be plugging it in backwards or plugging the middle part in. READ YOUR MANUAL. Set the jumpers on your hard drive to master. I need more information though. Do you have 2 ide cables? and what motherboard do you have?

[hungurr]

Hi,

I have an IWill KA266 motherboard. The hard drive is set for master. I have two IDE cables, but I just have one of them connected to the IDE-0 connector. I just reversed the cable and it still doesn't work. I can't even get the hard drive to work by itself without the CD-RW. The hard drive works fine(starts spinning) when the ribbon cable isn't attached. As soon as I connect the ribbon cable, it stops dead.

[Confused]

First off don't plug and unplug with power applied. Hook up ide cables, then power cable, then power on. Also I would use the 80 wire cable (40 pin), with blue connector to mobo, black connector to master device and grey connector to slave device and set each to cable select.
Chas

[alber]

for what it's worth, i had a bad ide cable once and when it was hooked up to the drive i would get no power to the drive, seemed odd to me, didn't think the ide cable had anything to do with power, or lack there of, i replaced the cable and everything worked fine, you might try another cable just for the heck of it, and by the way, my cable was brand new, and was still bad so you can't trust cables no matter what.

[mike breck]

I think the green light on your mobo is probably just a power light to let you know there is power going to the mobo. When working inside the case, switch the mains socket off but keep the plug in the socket and it will help discharge any static electricity from your body.

[Alfie]

The purpose of the 80 wire ribbon is for a udma 66/100 drive to work at it's rated speed and to be recognized by the system,the drive itself is backward compatible and will work with a standard 40 pin ribbon,however when hooked up this way,it will default to udma 33 and not it's rated speed.
In order to enable udma 66/100 a special cable (80 wire,40 pin)must be used,blue to mobo grey to slave and black end to master,the drives must be configured to CS(cable select).
If a standard cable is used the drive is to be set to master and the colored strip on side of cable must be connected to pin 1 of device,as well as pin 1 on motherboard.Pin 1 is usually the one nearest to the power connector and pin 1 will be marked on the motherboard.
The pin 1 setup applies to all devices regardless of cable used.
Make sure that the cable that came with the motherboard isn't a 80 wire cable
using a different color scheme(count the wires if need be.)
If one cable seems different than the other,check them out and hook the drive up as stated.