Went to clean the PC inside, and I have those ribbons (IDE) and twist and bend them, (Gonna get rope ones soon) but afterwards, I was getting hard locks after a bit.. and slight clicking (It's C: drive too)

Anyway, I replaced the IDE Ribbon, and so far, 2 hrs later, no problems....
The old ribbon DID look pretty bad.. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Ever happen to you?

Either way, I STILL backed up every file just in case. (It's the 160gig drive I bought last March, so it SHOULD be ok. (Seagate--never ever had one die)

not with the ribbons, but I have had hard drive issues even recently. have an older computer here that WAS working up until the hard drive upped and died on me. have had a few others also choke on me, though even my ancient IDE cables have been kept in close to pristine condition. (I don't go into the case often enough to wear them down.) as for Seagate, my friend swore off of them for a few years and rolled with Maxtor. I still think he doesn't use them, and will use Maxtor or Western Digital, sometimes Fujitsu.

does it matter which end of the IDE ribbon is connected where?

I had once a poblem with detecting my new slave hard drive (the pins were set correctly for master and slave). Then when I connected the ribbon the other way round (the end which was connected to master I put to slave and vice versa) it worked okay.

For a drives it can matter which plugs go in which device. Assuming your cables meet the standard, then the plugs should be different colors. They do that so it is easy to figure out how to hook them up.

[ 07-04-2006, 02:20 PM: Message edited by: Seraph ]

no... I mean which to connect to master and which to slave. I never thought there was a difference before that incident.

I work for a company that builds computers. I've seen several new machines fail initial burn-in because of that IDE ribbon cable. Also saw problems imaging new drives that disappeared just by replacing the cable. FWIW, I haven't seen any fail using the rope style yet.

Yep, Z !

Just a few days ago, while putting a couple of new DVD drives in my PC I messed around with the ribbons trying to get things to fit nice in the case only to find the PC would not reboot.... (mentioned in clouds cafe) The problem was with the ribbon which was the only original item left in my PC from about 5 years ago! The heat makes them brittle I guess.

Moral of my story is when you get a new component/ motherboard etc use the new ribbons provided [img]smile.gif[/img]

I'm (still) building my machine from components I got last week. It works now, but it looks more like an alien autopsy than a computer, thanks to the annoyance of IDE cables and my motherboard (pretty much top of the line...) has only one IDE host adapter. Long story short - I've got a stack of 17 DVDs holding my hard drive up to the level of the CD-ROM drive just so that I could install Windows and get the drivers for an ATA card.

Wellard - about that IDE cable, could it have been a 40 pin, struggling to function in newer devices that would have preferred 80 pin? I only discovered the difference this week.

While we're on the subject, I found a cool article about the technical details of ATA/IDE.

http://www.mikeshardware.com/howtos/...ct_ide_hd.html

Very nice article, Lucern. That may explain some of my current fun... [img]smile.gif[/img]

That is a great link / article Lucern

I reccomend everyone who tinkers with their PC should read it [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]