Driveless ide cable.

[Mike Amiro]

have you ever run in to this.
computers runnin a sata boot drive for windows. there is an ide cable plugged in to the motherboard but there is no device on the cable. system boots fine. Remove that empty ide cable and system Fails to post bios beeps. whats going on here!

 

[jarotech]

From my experience, you have a bad solder somewhere around the ide cable, not the cable itself. When the cable is plugged into the socket, the contact is made, but when you remove the cable, the contact is open. I could be wrong, but without doing some test, this is what I deduct.