I guess you don't have an other computer to test them with or you would have done so.

If you think its power related you can measure the voltages on the IDE cable against ground.

Personally I suspect the IDE cable. Stupid question, but are you sure it is connected in the right way?

If a hard drive is connected to the cable, does it work?

Sadly as this is my 1st retro build, i've got very little to test with. I do have another IDE cable coming tomorrow, so I can test against that - although the one I was using was brand new out of the packet. *EDIT i've found another cable, but that didn't work either.

This IDE cable has the notch in it, so that's ruled out. The SD card version has the power LED lit, so it isn't making much sense to me.

Hi, I don't want to say something maybe obvious, but the ide cable has the pins numbered from 1 to 40, and therefore they must be connected in the same way in the adapter, if by chance you put them on one side upside down it is normal that it does not work!
Make sure that the cable is connected correctly, the side with the red border is that of pin 1, so it is easy to connect to the mb (always pin 1), on the adapter it may happen that it does not say which pin 1 is, but you have to see where in the center there is a slot, if you put it on the top right there is pin 1.
Obviously then you have to set the HD as master and the adapter as slave, for the HD you have to check that this is already the case, for the adapter just move the jumper to open the contact.

I have had mixed success with CF->IDE adapters, I have a few here that are apparently read-only. The drive is seen and you can run fdisk to partition it, but upon reboot the partitions are gone and you have a blank card still. Switch to another adapter and BIOS doesn't detect it, but it works just fine, read and write, if you configure the C/H/S parameters manually (as written down from the earlier autodetection).

Some progress.

Put the IDE cable in "master" on the motherboard, and removed the jumper on the adapter as you said to slave....And it lit up! Thought it had been fixed, but alas...nope. It is now leaning towards IDE - but why? the cables only go in one way (notched) so is it just an incomptable cable/duff ones? Even that doesn't stack up as ive tried two with no success.

It could be the actual connector maybe. What happens if you connect it to the secondary ide channel?

It might be the socket. I plugged it into the secondary IDE channel (as mentioned in last comment.), and got some life. Does this mean now the primary IDE channel is faulty?

I would first clean it with alcohol and look if any pins are bent or missing. After that, Investigate the motherboard on both sides especially around the IDE connectors and south bridge. Look for bad capacitors, missing capacitors burnt areas..

out of curiosity... are you using an 80 wire cable or a 40 wire one ?

40. I've got an IDE CD Drive as well this morning, i'm going to try that with the cables on primary, and see if it is just the cable itself.

I've got it to run on Secondary IDE Master, and the CD drive seperately - as I can't run both at the same time at the moment. Both are recognised by the BIOS, but it just hangs past POST (after hard drive or CD drive detection). Still think it's the IDE cable, but tried 3 of them with no success.

Hi,
I have only a few hours of experience with these adapters but from that I would suggest you try this:

Go to the BIOS and, If possible, "throttle" the IDE port settings by disabling LBA, setting it to PIO Mode 1 and UDMA to the lowest value.

The goal is to find if there is a lowest common denominator which allows your board to properly communicate with the card. If that works, you "tune up" the settings from there, one by one and testing the boot process after every change.

Don't go ahead with a laborious OS installation until you find the best performant combination that works, just in case a later change alters the detected geometry and renders your partition unreadable.

Edit: also, I think mine is picky about having a second drive in the same channel, but I haven't confirmed that yet. So start by using just the adapter.

HTH.
AbD

Hi,

I've tried all of the settings you mentioned, disabling LBA, and to PIO mode 1, etc....and nothing. Still hangs at the hard drive detect stage. The Compactflash red LED goes out when it's about to be detected/when it hangs. I think i'll need to acquire an old IDE drive and this new cable i've ordered to see if that changes anything.

The problem seems too particular to be for instance the PSU. I think this is a problem with the motherboard or bios.

Did you check the board for damage, dirt etc? On both sides.

If it is ok I would start from scratch.

Check also a that any components are not touching the backplate of the case. Hell, even take it out of the case and test it before you put it in. Connect the CPU, one ram stick, gfx and the SD2ide.

Could you post pics of the adapter front/back?

Here's the device.

When the hard drives are not installed, everything goes through smoothly and can use the FDD to get into MS-DOS 6.22 setup, without issues (until it says no hard drive, obviously.)

that's an 80 pin cable, and on those the connectors are fixed.
one for mainboard, one for slave, and one for master.

mixing them up is a no no.

Ive got a 40 coming, so that's that done then. late edit: The guy who repaired and restored it on ebay forgot to tell me the primary IDE channel wasn't working... that explains that, at least. At least he admitted it and sending me a PCI / IDE controller for nothing to allow another channel.

Tried a 40pin cable today, and the problem persists....i'm wondering if it's the motherboard.