Re: Harddrive ide cables

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:18:42 -0400, Blattus Slafaly 0/00 ? ? ?
<boobooililililil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> put finger to keyboard and composed:

Phisherman wrote:
On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:24:22 -0400, Blattus Slafaly 0/00 ? ? ?
<boobooililililil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I bought a new 500 gig hard drive today. It came with an IDE cable with
a blue tip and the fine, tiny wires flat ribbon cable. Well it didn't
work with that cable. I have another cable like that that came with
another harddrive a few years ago. It don't work either. Only the old
fashioned IDE ribbon cables with the fat wires work. I thought the
wiring was the same; straight through; on both. So, what is it that I
don't know?


Blame the hard-drive controller. At this point I'd hesitate to buy a
new IDE drive controller, in favor of SATA.

Well my MOBO has both PATA and SATA. I have IDE 1 and IDE 2 and also
SATA 1 and SATA 2 I already was running a 320 gig SATA on that mobo. I
wanted to add another drive of the PATA variety in case the hard drive
in another computer craps out I can use it there.
My mobo also has both the AGP 4x-8x video adapter socket and the PCI
Express x16 video socket. It's a PCChips K8 A31G.

I just don't know why the fine wire ribbon cable don't work. Can they
BOTH be bad? I suppose so OR incompatible with MOBO? I don't know.

Just to be sure, which coloured connector are you connecting to the
drive and which to the motherboard?

According to the Wikipedia article referenced elsewhere in this
thread, "pin 34 is connected to ground inside the blue connector of an
80 conductor cable but not attached to any conductor of the cable. It
is attached normally on the gray and black connectors".

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Attachment

As far as the motherboard is concerned, if it detects that pin 34 is
grounded, then it knows that it is connected to an 80-way cable.

As for the HDDs, according to the following URL, the function of pin
34 is "PDIAG - Passed diagnostics". This signal is used by the slave
to signal to the master that it has completed its diagnostics. It
first lowers PDIAG to ground and then raises it when finished. The
master is required to wait up to 30 seconds for this to happen.

http://www.ele.uri.edu/courses/ele408/s2001/projects/roland_ide/ide.html

AFAICT, if the cable is installed with motherboard and master
connectors interchanged, then the master HD will always be seeing a
low on its PDIAG pin. This means it would be waiting for a
non-existent slave for 30 seconds until timeout, after which it would
proceed on its own. As for the motherboard, it would think that it was
connected to a 40-way cable.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
.

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