I believe you must go into BIOS setup and let the program recognize the new positions of your hard drive and cable, otherwise if the setting was not at "Automatic", it would beep.... no hard drive present where it should have been. Your machine would lock up and not proceed till a few minutes later (conservative estimate!) and probably show you a message stating no boot device. The order of the drives on the cable would not matter as long as one device is jumpered as "Slave" and the other "Master with Slave present". If you like experimenting, if you have a newer type of board, get the newer 40 pin - 80 wire cable (UDMA 66,100,133 compatible) and you should notice a difference in your machines efficiency (assuming you have the older type installed already). Howard Rubin Fortaleza, Brazil RE: Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 22:39:15 -0500 From: E B Lund <[log in to unmask]> Subject: ribbon cable installation Simple question. I've been monkeying around with hard drives in my case. But, when I reinstalled original (known working) hard drive, I got some beep codes and nothing else happened. So, I pulled the ribbon cable and plugged it in the other outlet on the ribbon and it worked fine. Is it possible it was just not plugged in all the way, the ribbon was bad, or does the sequence the drives are linked matter? Eb Lund The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering Mandrake Linux or Red Hat Linux CD sets along with the OpenOffice CD... at a great price!!! http://freepctech.com/goodies/promotions.shtml