Hi.

I have a number of (very inexpensive) PATA-SATA adaptors I bought a while ago. They plug into the back of a SATA drive and make it appear as a PATA one, for use in older machines without SATA ports.

The things are actually bidirectional, so could be used the other way around assuming you could physically connect them. They use a Sunplus SPIF-223A sata bridge chip, and work very well on almost every machine I have tried them with.

However, last night I ran into a machine that they DON'T work with, for an odd reason, and I was hoping someone might have an idea how to resolve the problem. I bought the things because I have a number of older shuttle boxes that both only have PATA ports and have only one or two PCI slots, which are full with required cards. This precludes the option of simply installing a PCI SATA card. However, the machines are still very useful, and surprisingly fast. I just want to add larger drives.

On my oldest shuttle, some 8 years old, the things work perfectly. I can simply attach any random SATA drive via an adaptor and it just works.

However, on my old games machine (a shuttle SN41G2 with an athlon XP3200 processor) when the drive is connected, I get the message "no 80 conductor cable connected" and it appears to hang at that point. The bios sees the drive correctly, though. And there definitely IS an 80-conductor cable connected

The detection of an 80 cable IDE cable appears to be done via detecting a low on /PDIAG, pin 34 on the IDE connector, during boot. Allegedly this is grounded internally on the 80-pin cable. On the adaptor, it is also connected to ground. On a real PATA drive, it isn't, but is presumably driven low at the correct point during boot.

I tried disconnecting the adaptor end pin 34, but it made no difference. If it was as simple as the signal needing to be actively driven at a specific time I would expect the adaptors to not work at all, as it's hard-wired to ground. However, as I said, in everything else I've tried, including USB to IDE adaptors they work fine. A friend of mine also has the same machine and it does the same thing, so it's not just a fault with my particular one.

Does anyone have any idea of why this specific series of shuttle get all bent out of shape about these adaptors? Or any ideas on how to persuade the thing that it really does have the correct cable?

pca