connecting cables

a friend disconnected the cables to the hard drive cd rom and floppy drive and put a cd burner in my computer i know nothing as to how to hook up the cables so my computer will work again my friend has since moved and computer places charge money which i do not have please help

 

Hi,
How to's with some pictures and diagrams:
http://www.easeus.com/resource/install-ide-hard-drive.htm
http://www.webtechgeek.com/How-to-installing-a-drive.htm

Your hard drive will already be set(jumpered) as master, you will just need to connect the (80 lead) cable between the hard drive and the primary controller on the motherboard and check that pin #1 on the motherboard goes to pin #1 on the drive (one side of the cable will be coloured (red) as pin 1).

Connect the CD burner to the secondary controller on the motherboard, it only needs to be set as master or slave in relation to any other drive on that cable.

On the cable for the floppy drive, you should see a twist in some of the leads. The twisted end goes into the floppy drive, not the motherboard. Again, just check pin #1 goes to pin #1 and if there is no guide around the connector pins on the floppy drive, make sure you don't offset the connector on the pins. You will see the smaller power connector for the floppy drive.

Matt
Edit: Just a note on cables. If you fold the cables in half you will see that the two connectors are closer to one end. Those two go into the drives, the long end goes into the motherboard.

 

Look on the motherboard as to where the cables come out
You cannot do to much wrong or cause to much damage as long as you unplug the computer and touch the metal case before working on it .
There will be two wider slots with a bunch of pins on the motherboard and 1 smaller one.
The cable to the diskette goes from the smaller one.
Do one cable at a time.
Then reboot . Just to make it simple.
Look fro one of the larger slots with the pins on the motherboard.
If one is marked one (1) attach that to the hard drive.
See if windows catches ( sees ) the drive
Next either attach the other cord to cd
If not attach the 2nd ( middle) of the the cord that goes to the hard drive to the cd .
It is just trial and error.
There are only so many combinations.

 

this is confusing everything is set in the computer and the two cables are connected to the mother board

 

It is a little hard to explain in writing and we are only imagining what the interior of your computer looks like.

I could try and guess why you only have two cables and not three, but that might confuse you further.

I suppose one cable is wider than the other. Connect the wide cable to the back of the hard drive. The narrower cable will be for the floppy drive, connect that as I said in my first reply. You can then startup and run the computer.

It would be best if you got someone that has installed a drive before to look at connecting the burner and discover if you have a secondary controller for it to be connected to (you can see the primary controller connector [blue] and the secondary controller connector [black] in the first link).

As visionof stated, you cannot make any critical errors if you just plug them in (not while it's powered up though...they don't like that ), but then you will have to start experimenting if they are configured incorrectly.

If I cannot see the back of the drive/s, I unbolt them and slide them out.

The only two things you should need to worry about is if you can get another cable for the CD burner (failing that, it can be set/jumpered as slave on the same cable as the hard drive).
The other is the jumper setting of the burner, if you can see the make and model on the label, you could download the user guide from the manufacturer's website. The setup is the same as a hard drive.

Matt