upgrading hard drive

R

rixx

Geek Trainee
i lent my friend a 40 gb maxtor hard drive. The drive cables i have, have a space missing for the centre space in the pins. His motherboard (i cant tell what it is but its old) doesn't have the same connections (the pins are in complete rows) and i cant plug my drive in using my cable. when i use his orginal cable the computer wont recognise the new drive ( i have tried the cable both ways round for polarity issues) and i only get the bios screen

So am i mistaken and there should be no problem or is the hardware imcompatible and he should buy a newer motherboard?
 
I'm only following 2 points: 1.)You lent a buddy a 40GB Maxtor hard drive; and, 2.)The connection on the motherboard isn't matching up.

I'm wondering if he doesn't happen to have onboard SCSI by chance or he's plugging it into the wrong place, like maybe his front panel connectors. Either way it won't fly
 
thanks for the reply - maybe it aint so clear.

The issue bout plugging it in wrong is ok cos i did it myself. Now using his ribbon cable we can connect his motherboard to my new drive. (This dont work though). So i try with my more modern cable and it dont fit the motherboard IDE socket.

so about the onboard scsi - what is that? And ill explain further about the pins. On my computer the IDE slots have 2 rows of pins for each slot. 1 row of each socket has a pin missing in the centre so you know how to plug the cable in and each cable has holes in a corresponding manner. His motherboard IDE slots have complete rows of pins and his cable also has complete rows of holes.

hope that makes it clearer.
 
That's common for the one center pin to be missing. My guess is that it's either A.) unused, or B.) setup to be connected only one way.

SCSI is a bit different from IDE and is more expensive. It uses 50- or 68-pin connectors, and the 50-pin ones can get confused with IDE ports since they are in a similar shape.
 
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