Can you put a HD and DVD/RW on the same IDE channel?

[gerbick]

Every IDE cable has the pink cable facing you. Floppy drives... the loop goes on top and that makes the pink cable on a properly marked cable face towards the inside of the case; opposite of the others.

You'd know if it's wrong if the light just stays on.

Now, also... make sure that the motherboard's BIOS even knows that the floppy is even there. As far as the rest of your problems; just sounds like the proper parts aren't completely hooked up. The plugs causing shorts is a very bad sign though. I'd recheck all connections.

[SpockBert]

Does the twisty bit on the cable go closest to the drive or the mobo?

I wonder if the Asus one provided with the mobo was faulty as the instructions said line up the red arrow on the cable but my cable doesn't have any red arrows. I tried another cable and got as far as getting the drive to format a disk and store a jpeg. Took the disk out, put it back in, jpg still there. If it does that its fair to say the drive and cable was properly installed?

Trouble was that was having the floppy drive outside the case, soon as I went to screw it all in properly using the exact same connectors it failed to work

The plugs causing shorts, could that really be caused by other connections being wrong, as when the computer is running (floppy aside!) everything works fine, dvd reads/burns, sounds fine, picture fine, internet fine.

As I'm outside the 28 days, their policy says any faulty parts are repaired rather than replaced. Can you repair the circuitry on a mobo though?