4way ide adapter found. No writing on it.

[kaneelschep]

Hi all.

I found our old 4way ide adapter, but it has no writing on it besides; m-drive.
Dont know what is ide 1 or 2 or the cable to the amiga ide.
Dont even know what is pin1 on the connectors.
Anyone knows this device and can tell me?

Thanks!

[Hewitson]

Can you take a good picture of the top and bottom of the board?

[kaneelschep]

I just wanted to make a picture.. But then started playing some mods.. :-)

[volvo_0ne]

That's helpful then.............

[Hedeon]

I just wanted to make a helpful remark, but then took an arrow to the knee.

[kaneelschep]

I have so little time for this hobby. And when my wife came in and showed some interest instead of wanting to pull me away, I had to play her some mods I used to listen to on this amiga in 1993.

Anyway! I made pictures! The lead goes to a 4 pin molex.

[kaneelschep]

I tried it in a few combinations. It never boots though.
Maybe i still do something wrong.

And does it need the option for 4 way adapter to be selected during install?
I read some people say no, some say yes. Its quite conflicting.

I have idefix and use it for my 80g hd. But didnt choose for 4way adapter then.
is there a way to make it know about the 4way adapter now? Or just by installing it again?

I want to run a cf card on the other ide port.

Thanks!

[kolla]

If you only want two devices, you don't need a 4-way adapter, just a ordinary IDE cable or equivalent bracket.

Here is one I made some time ago... https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/M6rM2c0D

[kaneelschep]

The cf card doesnt work well together with others. Thats why i want it alone

And the harddisk allready has a dvdrom next to it ;-)

[kaneelschep]

No one knows anything about it? It came from around 1993 I guess.

[thomas]

I don't know anything, but there are some ideas which should be obvious actually.

The molex connector is for power. Probably without power it does not work.

The two black wires are ground lines. Now you can trace the lines on the PCB and see which pins of the IDE ports are connected to ground. According to the IDE pinout pin 40 is ground.

So on your first photo pin 40 is on the left side for all three connectors.

Now you have to find out which connector belongs to which port. That's trial and error I fear. You need two IDE cables and a HDD, then you have six combinations to try.

It's more likely that one of the outer connectors is the motherboard connector, so you should try these first.

1  mb   -    mb   hdd  hdd  -
2  hdd  hdd  -    -    mb   mb
3  -    mb   hdd  mb   -    hdd

Don't trust that it will boot. Use HDToolbox to check whether the HDD is recognised. Also reboot once or twice if it's not seen.

If you see the HDD in HDToolbox, then the connector where the HDD is connected to is channel 1 and the empty one is channel 2.

In order to see devices on channel 2 you need the IDEfix software. If it does not work out of the box, run IDEfixPrefs and try other adapter types.

[thomas]

Well, don't know anything is not quite right. It looked very familiar from the beginning. Now I found an old (German) manual for a VOB Speedup System which I owned long ago. It looks very much like what you have.

https://computerarchive.org/files/co...0Manual-DE.pdf

According to the manual the one connector which is not aligned with the other two goes to the motherboard. The one on the opposite side is channel 1, the one in the middle is channel 2. If the 2.5" connector was present it would be channel 1, too.

Pin 1 of all connectors is towards the IC, which is the opposite of what I supposed!

[kolla]

The molex is for powering a 3.5 disk or CD drive, I'm sure

How much failure that could have been avoided if just all manufacturers would remove the key pin and make it obvious which is pin 1...