I am trying to connect a 3.5" IDE CD-ROM drive to a 2.5" IDE ribbon sharing HDD onto a single IDE port on the motherboard of my device. I have a small board which is used to convert the IDE signal from 2/5" to 3/5" but this has a power socket attached and I don't know if this needs to be attached to a supply if both the CD-ROM drive and motherboard at either end of the link have their own power sources. Also, what jumper settings do I need for the HDD and CD-ROM. The CD-ROM has two rows of three pins with the letters CSM printed above the letters SLA, what do these mean and where do I need to set the jumper ??

SLA stands for SLAVE so if u have more than one drive, setting it to SLA will tell the computer that it is not the Master drive. if u want to like use it for boot CD's then set it to master. as for the converter it seems u need to give it sum juice to actually to its job...read the manual? :P

The converter didn't come with any documentation whatsover, I assumed that it was therefore a standard connection set up that I was not aware of and someone else may have encountered. As for the jumpers. As I said. the letters SLA appear beneath the letters CSM which both appear above the three sets of jumper pins. So if my choices of pins are CS, SL or MA which of these is which ??

CS is Cable Select, SL is Slave and MA is Master. If you are running another CD rom and you want that one to be the primary and this cd rom to be the secondary then Slave=Secondary and Master=Primary. Cable select will select for you (theoretically). I don't like using CS, but some people swear by it, so you have to decide. If you have it on the same cable as your hard drive then you need to set your hard drive to master (primary) and your cd-rom to slave (secondary). Now as for that IDE cable, are you sure that the size isn't for your floppy drive? Usually the only smaller IDE cables like that are for the floppy. I have never heard of a cable that will shrink down like you are talking about, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist it just means that I haven't come across one yet. I would think from the sounds of it that your IDE cable is either too small and intended for a floppy, or it's time to upgrade your motherboard. By the way, you generally don't want to slave anything to your hard drive if you can avoid it. If not then it might not be such a big deal.

CS = Cable select SL = Slave MA = Master

"reads over the post again" Are you trying to connect a desktop CD-ROM drive to a laptop? Just trying to figure out the 3.5 CDROM - A 2.5 connector. Most of the time its the other way around connecting the laptop HD IDE (2.5) to your desktop IDE (3.5) The connector you have should have the 40 pin male connection for a IDE cable, a power connection, and a 40 pin female connection that would plug in to the laptop HD. If that is what you have it is used to connec laptop HD's to desktops. It doesnt work the other way around.

The unit is a specially made small size PC for industrial use. It comes with a 2.5" hard drive and is generally like a laptop in configuration except that it doesn't have a CD-ROM drive. We corrupted the WINDOWS O/S on it and need to reinstall from CD.