How to Set Up up an IDE Cable
Setting up an IDE cable can seem at first blush to be a very confusing experience, however it really only takes a few minutes to do it and can be done by anyone. Integrated, or Intelligent Drive Electronics, cables are used to connect hard drives and DVD/CD drives to your motherboard. They can be confusing to set up mostly because you need to change the jumpers on the drive you are installing before attaching the cable. Jumpers are small plastic devices which slide onto pins on the back of your hard drive and tell the drive if it is a "master," "slave" or "cable select" drive.
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Instructions
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Set the jumpers on your hard drive or DVD/CD drive to "cable select." This will make sure that no matter what you do, your drive will behave correctly. If the drive is an older one, it may not offer "cable select." If this is the case, you need to pay attention to which drive goes where on the cable. An IDE cable features three connectors. Two of them are close together and one is farther away. The two closer together are intended to be connected to your hard drive or DVD/CD drive while the further one is connected to the motherboard. If you cannot select "cable select" on your drives, select "master" for the drive which has the first connector and "slave" for the drive which has the second connector. See the manual for your drive to find out how to set the jumpers for each of these settings.
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Connect the first connector on your IDE cable to your hard drive or CD/DVD drive. If you are putting two devices on one cable, connect the second device to the second connector.
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Connect the farthest end to the IDE controller on your motherboard. There are often two of them; either connector will work. Note that IDE cables are keyed so that they will only fit in one direction. If you find the cable will not go on, odds are you have it backwards. Simply turn it around and put it in place. Just push it down until it will not go any further.
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Connect a four-pin Molex connector to the power supply on your hard drive or DVD/CD drive from the power supply inside your computer.
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Tips & Warnings
If you have two drives and two IDE ports on your computer, you can also connect one cable to each of them and ignore the second connector on the cable. Note also that hard drives and DVD drives often come with a diagram on the front of the drive telling you how to set the jumpers for "slave," "master" or "cable select."
Never touch your hard drive or DVD/CD drive without first grounding yourself by touching the metal part of your computer case. Failure to do so may cause static electricity to be released which will damage the sensitive electronic equipment. Note that this precaution is not necessary when putting a disk into the DVD/CD drive; only when installing it or a hard drive.
