i need help with my hard drive and ram

sorry if this is a weird question but i am but i am building a computer and all i have left to buy is RAM and a video card, when i plug power into my dvd drive and my hard drive they spin and i can open and operate my dvd drive but as soon as i plug in my IDE cable they both shut down completely and they wont spin or open.



is this only happening because i havent bought any ram yet.

any help would be cool

thanks

First off, you ARE shutting down and cutting the machine back on when you reconnect, right?

Assuming you are...this is fairly typical for either a backwards/faulty cable, or having the wrong jumper settings(HD should be master, CD should slave) Also, it's typically good measure to run the two devices of different IDE channels if possible.

i only have one ide imput on my board so i have to use the splitter cable so yea, and my jumpers are set to master and slave... when you say shut down my computer.. i don have a video card yet or an OS. i plug my power cable in and flip the switch then press the power button on the front of my case, i notice that the drive is not spinning so i just flip the switch in the back off.

is that not what i should be doing

How you're shutting it off is fine, but it should power down using the front button as well.

Are you using the ide cable that has the finer wiring, or does it seem thick? I accidently used a cdrom ide for a harddrive, things didn't go well.

A IDE cable either has 40 pin-40 wire or 40 pin-80 wire, there no such thing as a CD-rom or Harddrive IDE cable, they will work with one or the other or both.

I think what he was asking was, are you plugging in the IDE cable while the computer is running?