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[eddie]

No not Politically Correct-Personal Computer!

If you have or are about to put a PC together from components watch for this one. Just replaced my partners PC case and spent hours trying to figure out why it wouldnt boot.

Many Motherboards now come with only one PATA (parallel ATA) connector and several SATA(Serial)  connectors

More often than not the DVD drive will be mounted at the top of the case and the hard drive further down in the 31/2" dept.

This means you will (probably) use the ribbon cable thus.

||m/b===||d/d=================||dvd

Well look out cause it doesnt appear to work too well,I'm still looking into this.  I had to drop the DVD to the bottom of the 51/2" stack and reverse the cable..

||mb================||d/d====||dvd

Now the PC boots.


eddie

[PC Techy]

All IDE drives have jumpers that select the "master" or "slave" role on the controller, but modern drives also have a "CS" or "Cable select" pin. This allows the IDE cable itself to select the drive's role: all the drives have the CS jumper set, and the cable chooses the master and the slave. Hence why your pc didn't boot with the cable ass backwards.

[eddie]

So your saying I could have set them both to CS instead of faffing about with the cable etc.? DD was on Master and DVD on Slave.

Right....where's the cat................

eddie

[Welung666]

If you have set a HDD as master it must be on the end of the cable, slave is OK mid-cable but the masters aren't happy in the middle.

[Bumbazor]

Most CD/DVD/BD drives are SATA now so no need for IDE; hard disks have been SATA for years longer. I have seen some motherboards even without a floppy disk connector. They had the blank holes, but no pins or socket.

Of course with old devices that are IDE the above won't help.

If you want to keep the DVD drive at the top do what I did about 6 years ago (carefully) and unclip the connector from the cable and move it along until its at the right position for the device to which you want to connect it. Then push it back on making sure all 40 or 80 contacts are made and clip the connector back together.
Or, get a really long ribbon cable and connect plugs where required. I once used an old 50 way SCSI cable that had the same core pitch, and just pulled the last 10 away to make a 40 way IDE cable, put new connectors on, and could fold it and route it around nice and neatly.