Another help needed thread

mk17 · 17 Oct 2006 at 20:45

Hi all, after finishing off my X6800 build recently, completing it - not trashing it, I proclaimed to all within earshot how I was the new god of bildin stuff. Not only had I built my wunder-machine, but I had saved myself a wedge in the process.
So one of friends asks me to help him out, we talk budget, he orders parts, parts arrive and I arrive to set them up. Anway, its all posting, but its not picking up either dvd, or floppy drive. Juice is hooked up, in a bit of a tangle of cables from the ATX port through several hard drives, a couple of fans, the fdd and ide dvd.
There is no sign of life from either fdd or dvd. they are brand new, not so much as a beep, a flicker of a light, or a half-hearted attempt to spin up.
Has anyone any ideas, please?

edit: to be honest Im not even sure its getting power to the hard-drives, I just don't expect them to spin up on first boot.

semi-pro waster · 17 Oct 2006 at 20:48

The system specification might help but maybe not. Have you tried any of the other cables? Does everything else appear to power up as normal?

mk17 · 17 Oct 2006 at 20:54

E6600 + AC Freezer Pro, Abit AW9DMax, 2GB Corsair, 3*320GB HDD, Plextor DVDRW (swapped for a LG CD Reader to test), standard FDD, Corsair HX620.

The three fans all spin up, the LED posts status notification, ending with FF which is the boot interrupt. It appears to be looking for drives? There doesn't seem to be any sign of life? Is there some sequence of daisy chaining power connectors between peripherals I'm missing. Powers in the mobo, and in the graphics card, fan on the card works as well.

xirokx · 17 Oct 2006 at 22:58

are the IDE cables connected correctly?

have you tried using different IDE cable connectors?

as you say theres no power therefore I can only assume the cable connectors from mobo to each device are dead...

mk17 · 17 Oct 2006 at 23:20

I'm inclined to agree. We found one defective cable, with a pin pushed inwards, and swapped it out, removed all but one hard drive and connected it through a sata2 to the mobo, but no joy. At this point I'm considering a whole new set of cables, but does anyone have an idiots guide to connection from the 4 pin mobo connection to hdds, through graphics to fdd and IDE? It'd be a great help at this point. Thanks.

xirokx · 17 Oct 2006 at 23:28

you mean this:

http://img92.imageshack.us/img92/1961/idesetupia1.jpg

ahh the mobo is ABIT...

I had the same thing once and aswell as one of the pins being bent on the actual IDE cable I noticed due to the way the pins are on the mobo, somehow they have become pushed outwards, so although my IDE cable was going into the IDE port it wasnt actually connecting to the pins....therefore you may wanna try pushing the pins sticking out back in with a bit of cardboard if you know what I mean..