question about ATA cable or IDE cable, i dun know what they are really :)

[warlock110]

it's the cable that plugs in the back of the hardrive and CDroms, and stuff like that, I guess it's call IDE cable, or ATA cable, the strange thing is that my computer would not work with the regular 40 pins cable, it only works with cable that only has 39 holes (missing one in the middle) why is that? it's really hard to find those 39 pin cable now a day, help me out plz, one of my cable is mess up and now i'm running on 2 IDE device :(

[AllenSmoker]

If you are using a cable without the pin-block, make sure the cable is connected properly on both devices. that pin block is just there so you cant plug it in backwards. Just line up the red stripe if its a flat cable to pin1 on the drive and motherboard and you should be fine.

[don256us]

Yeah. It's really nothing. You'll notice that the ribbon cables all have one edge marked in red. You'll also notice that your HDD, CD, etc have a marking for pin #1.

Red goes to pin 1.

That's all you need to do. Don't bother getting special IDE cables because some one will just stare at you blankly or something.

[InThrees]

Translation:

All you likely had to do was flip your cable over on one end when you tried it and found it didn't work, because you had pin 1 from the motherboard header connected to pin 40 on the hard drive.