stupid Q:

newbie here guys :roll:

on the motherboard i have a socket where the ribbons attatched which i'm trying to work out which goes where ie; floppy, dvd , cdr & H/D but one of the ribbon socket states (obviously) IDE 2,. it has 2 connectors at the end of the ribbon i thought these were men't only for the Hard drive?

it's connected to my dvd ram which the system reconizes but as soon as i try to connect a 2nd optical (cdr drive ) it won't register or reconize

can someone please tell me an idiots step by step guide on how these are connected up 1 by 1

also my memory is embarrisingly low, 2 x 64mb pc 133 sticks :oops: can this be a simple swap for 1 x 512mb stick or say even better 2 x 512 sticks? will my motherboard still accept them ok :?:

any help is welcomed

[Coops]

The Floppy Ribbon cable is 34pins

The IDE Cable is 40pins.

IDE sockets can support two devices on the same cable. These are configured in a Master / Slave Configuration. On the back of the drives you will see a set of jumpers to set the master and slave settings.

You must make sure that each device on the cable is either set to slave or master you must not have two devices set to the same setting otherwise they will conflict. So for example set the drive on the end of the cable to master and the drive connected to the middle of the cable as slave.

When you have two ide sockets on your mainboard you can connect IDE Hard drives to one and cd rom's to another. It is not recommended to mix CD ROM and HDD on the same cable as this can decrease the system performance.

As for the ram, no it may not be able to just swap them like that. It will all be down to what the max memory addressing is per slot of your mainboard. We would need to know what your make and model board is to tell you that.

Best Regards

Hi Coops,

thanks for that basic info it was gold dust :D

as for the ram situation i had an idea that would be ur reply to be honest :wink: i can't see any makes just numbers on the M/B but i'm gonna upgrade the sticks only slightly for now,

as it's a spare/secondary unit i only need to keep things fairly basic with the system anyway but a small upgrade is better than nothing, better that way only to find out the M/B won't accept the memory sticks if it is too much!

thank u coops for the fast reply & info much appreciated