Wierd floppy drive ribbon cable

[flpicshooter]

My new PC is a hand-me-down. It is an IBM machine running Windows 98. I need to add an internal Zip drive to it. In the new PC, one of the ribbon cables has two hard drives attached to it. The other ribbon cable has only a floppy drive attached to it. This is where I plan to add the zip drive.

There are a couple things that I have noticed about the ribbon cable attached to the floppy drive.

1. The ribbon at the socket going into the floppy drive has been modified. A middle section has be separated and twisted around thereby changing the order of the wires going into the socket.
2. The ribbon is only about six inches long and it has only two sockets. One goes into the motherboard and the other into the floppy drive. There is no third socket available for the zip drive.

So basically I need a new socket on the ribbon cable so that I can install the zip drive.

My questions:

Is the order of the wires going into the floppy drive important or can I use a regular, unmodified ribbon cable and with three sockets?

If the order of the cable going into the floppy drive cannot be changed, can I use a regular ribbon cable that has three sockets and use an adapter (female to female?) to attach current floppy drive ribbon cable to the new ribbon?

I hope that my explanations and questions are understandable. Please ask me to clarify if it is confusing or ambiguous.

Thanks for your help.

[Cricket]

Originally posted by flpicshooter My new PC is a hand-me-down. It is an IBM machine running Windows 98. I need to add an internal Zip drive to it. In the new PC, one of the ribbon cables has two hard drives attached to it. The other ribbon cable has only a floppy drive attached to it. This is where I plan to add the zip drive.

An internal Zip drive is a IDE device and doesn't connect to a floppy cable, it connects to an IDE cable on one of the IDE channels.

Originally posted by flpicshooter 1. The ribbon at the socket going into the floppy drive has been modified. A middle section has be separated and twisted around thereby changing the order of the wires going into the socket.

That's normal...that's how all floppy cables look.

Originally posted by flpicshooter 2. The ribbon is only about six inches long and it has only two sockets. One goes into the motherboard and the other into the floppy drive. There is no third socket available for the zip drive.

That's because most computers only use 1 floppy drive (if they use any at all).

Originally posted by flpicshooter So basically I need a new socket on the ribbon cable so that I can install the zip drive. My questions: Is the order of the wires going into the floppy drive important or can I use a regular, unmodified ribbon cable and with three sockets?

As mentioned above, the Zip drive connects to the IDE cable (the one the hard drive or CD-ROM drive is connected to), not the floppy cable.

Cricket

[pam123]

These are the instructions for installing a zip drive : http://www.iomega.com/support/manual..._drive_pc.html . As you can see it does NOT go on the floppy drive's cable but on the secondary IDE connection.
From your description I can't tell if you have room to add one to that comp.
I'm guessing you have a CD-ROM so it would be slaved to cable with the CD_ROM as master.

[flpicshooter]

Thanks for your replies. I see where I am confused.

I will look for a second IDE socket and/or ribbon cable.

Thanks again.