I received a new drive cable frrom David a few weeks ago. I finally attached it this eve. After install, the player does not power up, in the car or using the wall plug. I doublechecked and finally reinstalled the old cable. After reinstalling old drive cable now the player is functional.

Any idea what may cause this? another bad cable? I should at least get a "no drive" error.. correct?

David, I will be contacting you tomorrow via emails I guess..

Any idea what may cause this?

It is surprisingly easy to plug the cable into the disk drive offset by one pin. If you do this, it won't cause any damage -- but your disk drive won't spin up.

tanstaafl.

duplicate post...

I doublechecked that. It was exactly as I removed it. All pins lined up correctly.

If you plug in a laptop HD cable wrong by 1 pin then it can fry something expensive. A collegue did this and blew a bunch of fuses on a motherboard because 5V and ground ended up swapped over.

The power is right at the end of the connector and can be easily wired wrong if the connector isn't aligned.

I've plugged a desktop IDE drive in with the cable in backwards once though. It just refused to start up but once I swapped it over it worked fine. Teach me to not have proper cables with the key.

- Trevor

What happens if you unplug the HD?
If everything is working okay then it should start up and give the no HD message.

- Trevor

I did not try to disconnect cabling from the board as I did not want to fry anything. The empeg was acting like ther was no supplied power to the board at all...

I did not plug in correctly. There is only one way to plug it in, correctly..

I have an email into David.

Silly question, but you didn't plug it in 180 degrees reversed? That gives the "dead unit" syndrome as the PSU can't start up. It's quite easy to do when you're testing cables and have the drive tray out of the unit, I've done it several times...

Hugo

I actually plugged a 2 1/2" SCSI-drive into an IDE connector (Yes, such drives exist and they use the same connector.)

This destroyed and made black marks on quite a lot of different things. Motherboard, IDE-controller, and there was a big "bump" on the drive itself.


Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)

this exact same thing happened to me when I swapped cables, turns out I did have the cable offset by one pin on one of the connections, double, triple, quadruple check it.

eli

And it may LOOK like it is securely attached to the board... press down on it again to make sure.

I think this may have been the problem. I rechecked the connections and even though all of the connections were correct I must have not pushed the connectors on all the way. (or I lucked out after f%cking with it enough) .

Now all seems to be functional, and better than before.

Sweet!