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2 to 4 pin HD LED connector?

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First post, by gamingretro

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Hi all, I haven't encountered this issue before, so I'm hoping someone here can help. I have an old Socket 4 motherboard that has a 4 pin hard drive light connector on the motherboard, but of course the case led (as is standard) has a regular two pin connector. I've tried just about every combination, putting the two on the left two, then the right two, then the middle two. No HD light comes on. Is there another way to make this work... maybe a 2 to 4 pin adapter? Thanks!

https://imgur.com/gallery/qdhT2MP

Reply 1 of 7, by pan069

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gamingretro wrote on 2021-08-10, 20:08:

I have an old Socket 4 motherboard...

Do you know what type/model motherboard it is? It might help in trouble shooting.

Reply 2 of 7, by Caluser2000

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What type of hard drive is it. My magical powers haven't woken up yet...😉

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 3 of 7, by gamingretro

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Sorry, I don't see a model number on it. It's a socket 4 though; I've got a Pentium 66 running on it. The hard drive has an IDE interface-- a few gigabytes in size. It's running DOS 6.22 just fine.

It's weird I've never seen a four pin HD LED connector before...

Reply 4 of 7, by gamingretro

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Thanks guys, but I got. Turns out that it was a bad LED or bad connection; I used a different LED and it worked. For anyone with this issue in the future, try connecting the red cable to the far left pin -- that's the correct configuration in this case, at least. Cheers

Reply 5 of 7, by mkarcher

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gamingretro wrote on 2021-08-10, 20:40:

Thanks guys, but I got. Turns out that it was a bad LED or bad connection; I used a different LED and it worked. For anyone with this issue in the future, try connecting the red cable to the far left pin -- that's the correct configuration in this case, at least. Cheers

If i remember correctly, the original IBM AT pinout for the HD LED connector is "+ - - +", so the red cable to either outer pin, and the black cable to either inner pin should work on 4-pin LED connectors.

Reply 6 of 7, by wiretap

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I have an old cyrix 486 25mhz and an XT clone that has +xx- as the pinout. You can try that. Just use a 4x1 2.54mm header connector and swap the pins into it. They pop out of the connector with a needle by lifting the little flap on the side and pulling the wire out.

Other than that, try a different LED that you know works, or put the hard drive LED onto the power LED header to make sure it is working.

I have had HDD LED drive circuits on the motherboard go bad as well. One time I killed one with an ESD shock from an ungrounded front panel with a metal vandal style LED. You can run some HDD utility to get constant drive access and put a multimeter on the pins to see if you get 3.3 or 5 volts.

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Reply 7 of 7, by BitWrangler

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You might also find you have a socket/header on the front of a hard drive that you can plug them to directly (Era apropes ones, not seen it on late PATA or SATA)

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