IDE Pin help

[Heineken]

Alright, here is my problem. I bought a IDE hard drive a while back and used it for a while, its a 200GB from some small company, but it was really cheap, thats why i got it. My problem is that on the IDE connectors, PIN 39 broke off. It's completely missing. I went on a few websites to see what exactly pin 39 is used for, and found out that it sends the 'Drive Active' command. I coulnd't find any more detail on it than that. I'm guessing that if the drive is being used, that pin is sent a 1 bit to tell the computer that its active. I am wondering if anyone knows anything about this kind of stuff. I would really like to use the hard drive, but I don't know if that missing pin will cause data loss or even harm other parts of my computer. I hooked the hard drive up, and it gets recognized fine, and it shows up in windows where I am able to access all of the files on it. So I just wanted some input on whether or not Pin 39 is really necessary.

any ideas? insights? websites I can get more information from?

thanks!

 

[RicoDirenzo]

I doubt that it will negatively affect your puter. Rule: "if it ain't broke...don't fix it". Use it till it dies and forget about pin 39 if the drive is functioning ok. Or......immediately shut down when you start to see smoke!!! (Just joking)

Given your handle.....is that the cause of missing pin 39? You drank one too many? Har!

 

[Heineken]

haha, na just from switching it from system to system too many times, i guess the pin wore out and broke off. I figured that that pin was not very important, i've done some more research and found that people use that pin for modding individual hard drive activity lights, so hopefully that's the only thing its used for. and seeing a blinking light to tell me the hard drive is active is not very important to me anyway.

hopefully the hard drive won't die anytime soon!

 

[RicoDirenzo]

Word!