IDE cable problem

MisterAnarchy

I just bought myself a DVD- Recorder and tried to install it last night.
In my system I previously had the Hard Drive solely connected to the Primary IDE connector .
On the secondary IDE connector I had a DVD Rom as the master and a CD-RW as the slave.
As the DVD-RW can only copy cd-s at 8x ,I obviously need to keep my 40x CD Writer.
Likewise I'd like to keep the DVD-Rom as it reads at 16x as opposed to 6x on the DVD-RW.
I decided to connect the CD-RW and the DVD-RW on the secondary IDE .
This was fine.
Then I enabled the DVD-ROM drive as a slave on the Primary connector.
However the IDE cable wasnt long enough to reach the DVD-Rom drive.
Running from the Primary connector to the HDD is a long cable .
Off this is a small short cable.
I decided to reverse the cable.
i.e put the blue end on the DVD-Rom and the other 2 ends on the HDD and Motherboard.
I tried a number of combinations but none of these work properly.
Surely the cable shouldnt matter which way round its connected as long as the DVD-Rom is connected after the HDD.

hussey

Firstly it would make sense for the DVD-RW to be slave to teh HD as I'd guess most of the backup's you are doing will be from data on HD ..

The IDI cable: The long bit of teh cable has to be at the mother board

in the following diagram the 'A' cable must be connected to motherboard

A                             B           C 
I-----------------------------|-----------|

you can just buy longer IDI cables .. cost 4quid in maplin

MisterAnarchy

Thanks for the advice.
It seems when you are using an 80 pin connector as I am ,the black end connector of the cable must be connected to the HDD.
This means my current cable is definitely too short.
Will connecting the DVD-RW to the Hard drive reduce the UDMA capacity of the drive to 33 instead of the 133 it currently operates at ?

Saruman

Will connecting the DVD-RW to the Hard drive reduce the UDMA capacity of the drive to 33 instead of the 133 it currently operates at ?

No...

By the way your DVD/rw can only copy cd's at 8x??? You did not buy this new did you? New ones are 24x usually for a cdr, 10x for cdrw and 4x for the dvd!! Like this one!

MisterAnarchy

Yes I bought it new.
It isnt a great model,TDK,2x DVD-R but I got it at an extremely good price ( Hot hands )so I had to take it.
I would have liked to get a 4X but it would have been an extra 70 euro.
It'll do me fine

MisterAnarchy

I bought a new 80 Conductor cable yesterday.
I connected it as so:
Primary IDE................Hard Drive.........................................DVD-RW
In this setup the Blue connector is connected to the DVD-RW.
I have configured the HDD as Master and the DVD-RW as slave.
When I boot up the system the BIOS doesnt seem to detect a Hard Drive or the DVD-RW
It loads Windows fine and seems to work perfectly.All devices are available
However if I reboot the machine this time all devices are detected in the BIOS.
Anyone know whats up.

hussey

That's just weird .. is your BIOS up to date??

it very strange that is wont detect it but yet boots from it

Rambo

Originally posted by MisterAnarchy
I bought a new 80 Conductor cable yesterday.
I connected it as so:
Primary IDE................Hard Drive.........................................DVD-RW
In this setup the Blue connector is connected to the DVD-RW.
I have configured the HDD as Master and the DVD-RW as slave.
When I boot up the system the BIOS doesnt seem to detect a Hard Drive or the DVD-RW
It loads Windows fine and seems to work perfectly.All devices are available
However if I reboot the machine this time all devices are detected in the BIOS.
Anyone know whats up.

Maybe the dvd-rw is starting up before the hard drive which may give you this false error

try putting the dvd-rw onto the second IDE