Defective IDE cable?

[BigSmooth]

I bought a KT7 recently and I think the IDE cable it came with is screwed up. One of the "mini-cables" in the ribbon cable has a break in it. It looks like this (use your imagination :


___connector is here____
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||||| |||||||||||||||||| <---------- there is a small hole here in one cable.
||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This isn't normal, is it? I mean, I can get another IDE cable easy enough, but I wanted to make sure that this is a defect.

 

[corkyg]

Trash it.

 

[BigSmooth]

Hmm... conflicting opinions here. Anyone else have any thoughts?

 

[NOSOUP4U]

why dont you try it and find out?

 

[BigSmooth]

That's what I'm planning to do, but I was working on my comp. last night and I work right by a computer store, so I thought if anyone knew today I could either pick up a cable on the way home or at least save myself a trip later.

 

[dkozloski]

The break in the cable enables the &quot;cable select&quot; feature. Set the jumpers on your drives to the &quot;cable select&quot; position and the cable takes care of the rest.

 

[BigSmooth]

Thanks for the help, all.

 

[corkyg]

I use nothing but Cable Select cables and jumper settings . . . have never seen a break in the ribbon. Is it buried in the connector?

 

[medic]

The cable you are talking about is a Cable select cable as dkozloski mentioned.
The missing wire is on Pin 28 and the connector on this end will be designated as Slave in a C.S. setup.
Also if you have two drives and set them both to Cable Select and use a regular IDE cable they will both be seen as Masters.

corky-g
If you have set them both as C.S. and the cable supports C.S....and they work, the cable has an internal grounding of Pin 28 which does the same thing as cutting it, or it's cut inside the connector.

 

[corkyg]

Thanks for the info, CRV. Been using GSI Inc. CSEL cables for over two years. makes everything a lot easier especially when shuffling and cloning HDDs in and out of systems. The location determines the relationship . . . and I don't see what's inside those connectors. <VBG>