# PC cabling.



## UltraCulture (Jan 27, 2009)

I've recently bought a barebone pc and have fitted my old HD CD-Rom/DVD player etc, plugged in all the power and IDE cables, powered up the pc and no power gets to any of the peripherals, unless I remove the IDE cables, then the hd fires up and cd-rom and dvd are both lit.

Anyone got any ideas what's causing the IDE cables to stop power getting through.

There's no problem with me taking the pc back to them to set it up, but thought I'd ask your learned selfs 1st.

Cheers UC


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## Happy Joe (Jan 27, 2009)

I don't believe that the IDE cable will stop power from being available. However if your BIOS is set to look at the hard drive first and you change the position on the IDE cable it might become confused and sit there looking for the hard drive in the wrong place; preventing startup.
First try only connecting the hard drive to the motherboard, plug it into the end IDE connector and a power connector, then see if the system boots.
If you have more than one IDE motherboard connector try using the other motherboard connector.
Verify that the master/slave/cable select jumper on the hard drive is properly set and that the device is in the correct connector on the IDE cable (end connector = master, middle connector = slave, cable select should assign the device as it positioned on the cable but I have seen cases where this did not work). 
Once you can get it to boot, with just the hard drive connected, shut it off and connect one device at a time checking that the machine will boot after connecting each device (remember to verify the device jumper setting; you can only have one master and one slave on each IDE channel). If the devices are set to cable select try changing the setting to slave for the device on the center connector and master for the device on the end connector. If you change the hard drive to slave and the machine won't boot you will have to manually change the boot sequence in the BIOS.

Hope it helps...

Enjoy!


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## ray gower (Jan 27, 2009)

Is the motherboard squealing when you turn it on?
It is not unusual for barebones kits to have undersized PSUs.
A 400Watt power supply is just enough to run a P4 processor, provided you restrict yourself to a single hard drive. Any more and it will get tempermental.


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