[leniko]

I'm adding a dvd-rw drive and the ide interface cable won't reach if I put the blue end in the motherboard. Can I put the black in the motherboard and use the grey and blue for connecting my optical drives? It will reach this way but I'm not sure of other implications. It is an 80 pin cable.

Edited by leniko, 11 January 2006 - 09:46 PM.

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Its actually called 40 pin (80 wire). The number of pins on cd roms and dvd roms is 40 pins.


The colors dont tell me anything because there is so many different colors out now for cables and motherboard ide slot colors. Blue is the most default color but I have seen many colors.


First of all, The harddrive with the operating system has to be on the primary master or it wont boot up.

If your saying that all you have to do is switch the cables and it will reach then yes that will work. Make shure you hook up the harddrive back up correctly. Remember primary master.


IDE Harddrives use the same cable as the cd roms.. Unless you have a scsi system. You never told me.


I dont know exactly what you have but try what you said. If it doesnt work the best thing to do is to buy a longer ide cable for you dvdrw drive.

[jrm20]

Its actually called 40 pin (80 wire). The number of pins on cd roms and dvd roms is 40 pins.


The colors dont tell me anything because there is so many different colors out now for cables and motherboard ide slot colors. Blue is the most default color but I have seen many colors.


First of all, The harddrive with the operating system has to be on the primary master or it wont boot up.

If your saying that all you have to do is switch the cables and it will reach then yes that will work. Make shure you hook up the harddrive back up correctly. Remember primary master.


IDE Harddrives use the same cable as the cd roms.. Unless you have a scsi system. You never told me.


I dont know exactly what you have but try what you said. If it doesnt work the best thing to do is to buy a longer ide cable for you dvdrw drive.

[leniko]

thanks

my hard drive connection is untouched. I am adding a dvd to the secondary ide which already has a cd attached to it. hope this helps

[jrm20]

yeah, you can have 2 cd drives on one ide cable. When you do this, one of the cd drives has to be set to master and put the other to slave by the jumpers on the back of the cd drives. Thats it.

So what you will have is 2 cd drives on the secondary ide cable.

If your worried about it reaching still buy a longer ide cable.

Good luck.

Edited by jrm20, 11 January 2006 - 11:00 PM.

[leniko]

jrm20, thanks for your thoughts

I know I can have 2 cd drives on the secondary cable
I know one needs to be the master, one the slave

What I want to know is does it matter which end goes to the motherboard?

I found this - While it (in practice) doesn't really matter whether you put the master on the end or middle connector, it does matter which end connector goes to the motherboard on a 40-pin/80-wire cable when the drive/drives attached is/are ata66 (UDMA mode 3) or above capable. The (generally) blue color coded connector must go to the motherboard. If you flip the cable end-on-end the system will not properly detect that you have a 40-pin/80-wire cable installed beause pin/wire 34 is only grounded at the blue connector side of the cable and the system uses this to detect the type of cable. So if you were to connect the (generally) black end connector to the motherboard the system would see the cable as the old 40-pin/40-wire style and throw up a warning message at boot.

It seems I can do it but I won't get the benefits of the 80 wire cable.

Edited by leniko, 11 January 2006 - 11:32 PM.