CD/Hard Drive cable Connection

[johnm377]

I am setting up a old garage sale computer and am having a problem adding a CD to it.

I have the computer booting from the hard drive with windows 95.

When I plug the CD into the same cable as the hard drive and I boot the system I get the error "HDD CONTROLLER FAILURE".

When I disconnect the cable from the CD everything works fine.

I plug the the CD in so that the red strip on cable matchs pin 1 on the CD. The last connector on the cable is plugged into the Hard Drive. The middle connector(only two connector's on cable) is the one I plugged into the CD.

Any ideas on how to fix the problem?

 

[ski]

The red stripe on the IDE cable should be next to pin 1 at the MB connector, and next to the power lead on the back of the drive.

If those are ok, then try a different known working IDE cable.

If no luck, then try a different power lead.

If still no good, then see if the CD-ROM drive works in another system.
If the same problem happens there, then the drive is probably bad.

 

[garebo]

If the cable is working properly it doesnt matter which of two connectors you are using, you could put the hard drive on either one of the two connectors, same with the cdrom, all you have to be concerned about is jumpering the hard drive so that it is master and the cdrom so that it is slave.
Since your hard drive works fine and boots to win95 then all is fine there. Since your cdrom doesnt work as slave, make sure it is jumpered as slave. If it is jumpered as slave then either that part of the ide cable is bad or the cdrom is bad.
You could also replace the whole ide cable and make sure the cdrom is jumpered as slave and try again.
If you still get the same results then the cdrom is broken.

also, you could try a second ide cable on the other ide connector on the motherboard and hook the cdrom to that and jumper it as master and see if that works. It may not want to work as slave but sometimes they will work as master.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[johnm377]

Thanks Garebo,

It was the jumper. I had it set as the master. When I changed the jumper to make the CD a slave the system recognized it.

Thanks again!!!

 

[garebo]

You're welcome, glad to help you.
We should always start at the very easy things when there are problems, like jumpers, lol.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips