Uhhh ?

IDE connector pins are pretty hard to break. They can bend but I have rarely seen them break
but uhh why would cut them off??

Are you talking about the connector on the HD, CDROM or motherboard?

it was for the hdd. damn. what im gonna do now is probably get an scsi card and see if i can get a new scsi hdd. or maybe an ide to scsi 50 pin adapter. the pins already had one or two broke and i broke another when i plugged it in.

what i meant was the motherboard pins are broke. wtf is my problem.

ahendricks18 wrote:

or maybe an ide to scsi 50 pin adapter

No such thing. SCSI is an entirely different protocol.

Is the IDE controller onboard? Quite unusual for the time. If not, you could always find another IDE controller card.

alright. ill get an ide controller isa card.

Take some pictures and show us. Check whether you can disable the IDE on the MOBO. If not you will have to go SCSI after all. I have an IBM PS/1 with SCSI because of that reason and no FDD.

Places that accept computers for recycling should be allowed to sell them to anybody, not just a recycler. If I see something I want in a stack of old computers, I can pay them more for it than the recycler will.

PeterLI wrote:

Take some pictures and show us. Check whether you can disable the IDE on the MOBO. If not you will have to go SCSI after all. I have an IBM PS/1 with SCSI because of that reason and no FDD.

It has a separate controller for the fdd, but I'm pretty darn sure you can disable the hdd ide and leave the fdd as is. I've found a contraption on amazon that allows one to use an ide hdd in scsi. An adapter.

How???, did you just do. Did you throw a brick at the motherboard, Certainly sounds like it. I have a Packard Bell Platinum 1 from Late 1995 which arrived at my house back in May 2014. I was not disappointed, tough machines! Packard Bells are strong, and some are good enough.....

Yeah I'm a bit confused also, you must have been very rough with it. 🙁

I wasn't really rough, I pulled it out at an angle and just one too many pins were broke and it wouldn't work so i thought id try to fix it by this wierd method on the web. But dont worry, I talked to the IT guy at school whose pretty cool and he suggested i get an ISA ide controller, which seems to be the best option. I wish i was better with the machine in the first place.

Well I guess you learned about that one the hard way. Next time if something isn't coming don't yank on it! Wiggle the plug until it eases out. Also, all IDE and Floppy cable ends pull straight out from the board it's plugged into.

Can't you just solder another IDE connector?

I may try my soldering skills on another motherboard to get another IDE connector. Its a broken dell from 2004-05 so I'm not worried about anything bad happening to it.

Alright, I didn't try to solder a new connecter but i bought a generic isa sound card and its got 2 ide controllers & another for floppy.

Nice, hopefully identifying it for drivers and getting it working wont be too hard. Good luck.

I am currently attempting to get an old Packard Bell Legend VI 286 going.
Currently it will boot up but it does take it a few power ups. Not sure if finding an external CMOS battery will help but need to try and find one.
Boots into a menu screen that is customizable, running on a 40MB Western Digital. Will get pics up of pieces and hopefully a full desktop at some time.

If you've got a soldering iron, you can probably make your own external battery. You just need to grab a holder for 3V or 4.5V configurations of batteries - could be a single coin cell, could be a couple of AAA or AA batteries. Butcher an old CD Audio cable or something to connect the holder to the board, usually they use a 4 pin connector, pins 1+4 are used... Packard Bell boards might be different though.

If you're feeling adventurous and there was an internal battery, you could always put a diode on your battery holder and solder your new battery holder's leads to the pads on the motherboard - you need the diode if you do this because otherwise the system might try to charge your batteries, which isn't good.

Not a real steady hand for soldering. It does have an external bat hookup on the board. Has a 4 pin connection but Pin #2 is not present.
And as I sit here reading the matching monitor just smoked up my office =( Hope its not fried.

Ah, well, take a shortcut 😉;

One of those connector blocks would probably do the job if you got a holder with wires coming off it. I can't speak for the monitor because I'm terrified of tampering with CRT screens, with any luck it will be something minor.