What happens if IDE cables are switched?

[Ymer]

Of lately, I have been having an annoying problem. My DVD-drive does not recognize CD-ROMs, CDs or anything really (except DVDs when I run them through "PowerDVD"), while my CD-ROM drive is slow, and when something runs off it, my systems slows down, making it near impossible to do anything else. When burning a CD-R with this drive, a 12x burn takes more than 10 minutes.

Could these problems be related to faulty IDE cables, or could these IDE cables be switched around? If I switch them now to check if things improve, what can happen?

Thnx for your time

[jkrohn]

Nothing bad will happen just from switching IDE cables.

Problems like this could occur due to bad cables as bad cables will lead to data loss. Some programs being more fault tolerant than others in this area.

Throw known good IDE cables, (Or new if you have them laying around) in there and see how it goes.

Jkrohn

[DallasDon]

Couple of thoughts:

Optical drives are just plain slow, anyway.

The master should be on the end of the cable, the slave in the middle.

The new 80 pin rounded cables could aid in data transfer. The extra foty cables are acutally an independent ground for each of the fory pins. Don't know the exact technical aspects, however.

[smapdi]

Ymer: First thing you might wanna do is what jkrohn said and use some cables that you know are fine. If you still have the same problem then check wether DMA is enabled on the drives or not. Having DMA enabled often speeds up your overall performance if your drives support it.

I have had 1 instance of something similar to what you describe. It was with an old Toshiba 3rd generation DVD drive. The drive would work fine in PIO mode but as soon as DMA mode was enabled the drive would stop reading any other media except audio CD's, VCD's and DVD movies. Turning DMA off for it cleared the problem right up.

DallasDon: not all rounded cables have special grounding cables. The only ones that I know of are the Antec Cobra cables and the RD3XP Gladiator cables (which look almost identical to the Cobras).

[redcaes]

What do you do with the grounding strap of an antec cobra cable what do screw it to?I have 2 of these cables and the 1 attached to my cdrw will not enable dma on that drive but does allow it on my PIO 52 x cdrom which puts it at dma mode 3 however "its a cdrom and doesn't need the dma the cd writer does" can any anyone help?

thanks in advance Redceas

[smapdi]

I screwed the grouding cables to my case to an empty ATX standoff. Make sure the CD drive and the CDRW both support DMA. If they do and you can't enable DMA, check if your bios is set to enable DMA on that channel and if DMA Mode is selected in device manager for that IDE controller. Also you may want to get the latest IDE drivers.