Wiring Problems

[Uninvited Guest]

My motherboard is a P5W DH Deluxe. He's the manual's schematic.

I am having trouble with my floppy drive.
I don't know where to connect it for power. The site says it's usb powered, but I have no idea here usb comes into this. It has a cable from the back that fits nowhere onto my motherboard, and it looks like it has a connector that would fit a SATA cable.
Here is a picture of the back, and here are pictures of cable I don't know what to do with. 1 2

I am also having trouble with my DVD Writer. I am missing the CD audio cable to connect it to my motherboard. He's a picture of the back.

I also don't know where to connect my DVD writer's Daisy Chain. My assumption is the IDE slot on the far right of mobo's picture.

And while I'm asking about stuff I don't know, maybe anyone with an antec SLK 3000 Case could tell me what the hell these are for?

Thanks a bunch guys.

 

[Lord Evermore]

As to the floppy drive: that appears to be a standard floppy power connector, not an SATA connector (kinda blurry so I'm not absolutely certain, but given its location and use of 4 pins, I'd say that's what it is). The big black cable is in fact a USB cable intended to connect to one of the internal USB headers which most mainboards have 2 to 6 of these days. Look at your mainboard manual and you should be able to locate them, though you may need to disconnect a front-panel USB port or something depending on how many headers you have. The manual for the reader/drive hopefully says something about what pins on the cable are what, or they're labelled on the connector, since it's not keyed to keep you from putting it on backwards (and you could possibly burn something out by applying voltage to the wrong pin).

What seems to have happened is they weren't very clear on how this drive/reader combo worked in the sales page. In order to use the floppy, you'll probably HAVE to have the standard floppy cable and power connection, and the flash media reader parts are separately powered and data-connected by the USB port. It's possible that the floppy part also runs off the USB port, as you can buy USB-floppies, but since they included the connectors for floppy cable and power I think it's unlikely.

As to the DVD drive: you don't need the audio cable with modern operating systems. That connector is only used for analog audio transfer to send it directly to your sound card or onboard sound controller. Most people prefer to let the OS perform digital audio extraction when listening to CDs on their computers. Much older OSes like Win3.1 and Win95 (I think) were not capable of actually playing music through the IDE connector, even though they could digitally extract audio for things like MP3 conversion. OEMs like Dell still tend to provide computers with the analog cable connected for some reason.

The DVD drive's ribbon cable should indeed be connected to the IDE port, just above the SATA ports. (The floppy cable connector is right above it, right beside the ATX power connector.) The black connector on the cable should go on the drive, and the blue connector goes to the motherboard.

The metal bracket is just a bay cover for the front 5.25 inch drive bays, I think. Stick those in place wherever you don't have an optical drive. They should just snap right into place thanks to the spring loaded tabs, and then stick the normal plastic bay covers on (or just close the door if that's what the case has). They help to provide electromagnetic shielding, but aren't exactly required.

 

[Uninvited Guest]

Thanks, every questioned answered. You're great

 

[Uninvited Guest]

My dvd burner was oem, it came with no cables. however, my motherboard did come with 3 daisy chains: HDD, Floppy Drive, and CD Rom drive. CD cable = DVD cable or no? The HDD cable has the black and blue connectors you've mentioned, the CD cable is black at both ends.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Any IDE cable can work on any IDE device. The cable with colored connectors should be an 80-wire cable, which is required for the ATA66 and higher speeds for hard drives. The other one is probably a 40-wire cable (the cable will look "coarser") which is only good up to ATA33 speeds, but that's all that optical drives usually handle. There are 3 connectors on the cable, the one that is farther away from the other two connects to the mainboard, the one on the end usually is used for the master device and the middle connector goes to the slave. You can use either of the IDE cables for the DVD drive, the 80-wire cable might provide some minimal better communication and protection from electromagnetic interference, but unlikely to be anything that'll make a real difference with the DVD drive.

 

[Uninvited Guest]

thanks again.