Hard Drive only works when connected as ATA33

[Cheep]

So I put in my new NEC 2500 DVD burner the other night. It worked fine, but the first burn didn't work. So, I shut down and popped the case open again to check the slave-master jumper settings on the burner. Tried to boot up again and I got the "insert system disk error." I have a IBM/Hitachi GXP 180 120GB drive. (It's normally fast-- 7200 rpm, 8 meg cache). Up until now, it's been hooked up through a Serillel adapter into the SATA port of my Abit NS7-S v2 mobo. I couldn't get the drive to work at all. So I unplugged everything, hooked the drive straight up to the IDE port with a ATA100 cable. Still no go. Switched cables, ports, still no go. As a last resort, I tried an old ATA33 cable and it booted right up. That's the only way the drive works now-- with the old ATA33 cable. ATA66/100 cables don't work. So the drive is slower than it should be. In fact, it's now laggy as hell. System is WinXP Pro, NTFS.

Anybody ever seen this? I got nothin'.

 

[Cheep]

Ok, so once when I restarted the BIOS told me "no 80-pin cable installed." Duh-- I have an old IDE cable hooked up, because that's the only way the drive works. I tried switching again to the ATA66/100 cable, and again, the HD wouldn't boot.

Is this a mobo or an HD problem?

 

[jcwagers]

Have you tried switching the direction of the cable? That might sound dumb....but it's a possibility. Most of the time the cables only want to go on one way but sometimes they don't have tabs and such and you might try putting the same ATA66/100 cable on again and changing the direction(put it on upside down) and see if it works. Also, have you tried both IDE channels? If you haven't, try to run it on the secondary IDE channel and see if it works. Good luck and keep us posted.
jc

 

[Viper96720]

Tried that ata-100 cable hooked up to the DVD drive. Maybe the cable is bad.

 

[Cheep]

Ok, figured it out. One of the pins on the IDE connector on the drive is broken off. Yuck. It's the one just to the right of the "blank" space where the notch on the cable goes.

This hasn't happened to me in 7 years of building computers-- guess I've been lucky.

Anyone know how to fix this? Super-delicate soldering required?