Installing Atapi CD-Rom Drive in A4000D

[Harrison]

I finally decided to have a go at installing a CD drive inside my A4000. Until now I've always just used an external SCSI 4x CD-Rom drive connected to a SCSI zorro card. It's always worked fine but has also been annoying with all the trailing cables for SCSI and power.

I had a spare LiteOn 52x CD-RW drive so thought I would give that a go as they are normally very short drives and should fit the A4000 case. And it did easily with lots of room to spare behind the drive.

So I connected the drive up as a slave to the main HD in the system. Booted the system up and proceeded to install IDEFix'97 to give the A4000 the support needed to access the CD drive. IDEFix found the drive straight away and within minutes it was all setup and working.

So now I have a working 52x writer installed in my A4000. Just need to try out some writing software now. Recommendations? Oh and to see who well the CD32 emulator works on the A4000.

One problem I do still have is the IDE cable. The A4000 uses standard 40pin ATA33 IDE cables, and whilst the one that comes with the A4000 does have two connectors for devices, the cable is too short and is really only designed for installing two HDs next to each other.

Therefore I need a longer cable. I've got loads of spare IDE ribbon cables so thought I would just use one of those, but have hit a problem. The IDE header on the A4000's motherboard has all 40 pins present, whereas normally they only have 39 with one gap in the middle of the bottom row of pins, and the cable connectors have a filled in hole where this gap is positioned. This is so you make sure you connected the cable up the right way.

So the problem I have is that all of my spare cables have the one filled in hole, whereas the A4000 IDE interface has a pin in that position so it is impossible to plug the cable in. Any ideas what I can do? I definitely need a longer cable than the one currently in the system.

[Buleste]

FOr cd burning you can try makeCD which you can get from here ignore the fact it's in german as there is an English version in the DL. As for CD32 emulation whilst the Power computing CD32 emulator can be a little more fiddly i still prefer it to the one supplied with IDEfix. For the IDE cables a good idea is to find a small PC shop that does repairs and ask for a 40 Pin IDE cable. They will eoither give it too you (Thats what happened to me) are sell it too you for peanuts (Make sure you take your nuts wuth you).

[TiredOfLife]

You can usually just poke through the filled in hole, with a pin.
It's generally just a tiny thin piece of plastic.

[Harrison]

I will give that a try now. Hopefully one of my cables is like that. Will save the hassle of having to buy another one.