X3CP HDD LED stays on all the time.

[lilkuz2005]

Hey guys, looking for some ideas to troubleshoot the red HDD activity LED on my X3CP. It stays on and is not blinking to show activity. I just did a DVD drive swap from a Samsung to a Hitachi, and I repasted the CPU/GPU. Made sure the jumper on my startech sata adapter is set to Master. not really sure why its staying on all the time. You guys got any ideas?

 

After messing around with swapping DVD drives, I have figured out it's my 80way IDE cable that's causing the issue. When I swapped out the cable the LED worked like it should. Does anyone know a fix for this? The IDE cable I'm using is the perfect length, so I really want to use it. I noticed some jumper pins on the back of some of the DVD drives, the Hitachi and Philips drives have these pins, are they used for serial connection or are they master/slave jumpers? 

Edited September 14, 2023 by lilkuz2005

[Bowlsnapper]

8 hours ago, lilkuz2005 said:

Hey guys, looking for some ideas to troubleshoot the red HDD activity LED on my X3CP. It stays on and is not blinking to show activity. I just did a DVD drive swap from a Samsung to a Hitachi, and I repasted the CPU/GPU. Made sure the jumper on my startech sata adapter is set to Master. not really sure why its staying on all the time. You guys got any ideas?

 

After messing around with swapping DVD drives, I have figured out it's my 80way IDE cable that's causing the issue. When I swapped out the cable the LED worked like it should. Does anyone know a fix for this? The IDE cable I'm using is the perfect length, so I really want to use it. I noticed some jumper pins on the back of some of the DVD drives, the Hitachi and Philips drives have these pins, are they used for serial connection or are they master/slave jumpers? 

Why do you have the jumper set to master? This should only be necessary if the DVD-ROM drive is disconnected and the HDD is the sole device on the Bus. The DVD-ROM drives are designated as Master. Master for the HDD works in at least some cases, but it isn't the proper configuration. Your cable is likely fine, although you can test at least one section (the farther half) of it by putting the HDD on Master, attaching it to the middle connector and then booting your dash. See if you see any difference in LED behavior.

The DVD drive may be defective in some way and is sending a constant signal to the Bus controller. The DVD-ROM drives do weird shit like this a lot more often than the HDDs do. Try swapping back to the old DVD drive and see what your light does.

[lilkuz2005]

15 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

Why do you have the jumper set to master? This should only be necessary if the DVD-ROM drive is disconnected and the HDD is the sole device on the Bus. The DVD-ROM drives are designated as Master. Master for the HDD works in at least some cases, but it isn't the proper configuration. Your cable is likely fine, although you can test at least one section (the farther half) of it by putting the HDD on Master, attaching it to the middle connector and then booting your dash. See if you see any difference in LED behavior.

The DVD drive may be defective in some way and is sending a constant signal to the Bus controller. The DVD-ROM drives do weird shit like this a lot more often than the HDDs do. Try swapping back to the old DVD drive and see what your light does.

it's not the HDD or the DVD drive, it's the cable, when I switched cables the issue went away, I tested 3 different DVD drives, Samsung Philips and Hitachi with the cable causing the LED issue and they all did the same thing, swapping out the cable fixed the issue. With the old short cable, the LED would blink with HDD activity. I'm not sure what could be different with the new long cable but I'm sure it's the cause of the issue. 

[Bowlsnapper]

6 minutes ago, lilkuz2005 said:

it's not the HDD or the DVD drive, it's the cable, when I switched cables the issue went away, I tested 3 different DVD drives, Samsung Philips and Hitachi with the cable causing the LED issue and they all did the same thing, swapping out the cable fixed the issue. With the old short cable, the LED would blink with HDD activity. I'm not sure what could be different with the new long cable but I'm sure it's the cause of the issue. 

The only thing I can think of is a short in one of the connectors. Maybe the pins are not aligned properly when the cable was manufactured.

[lilkuz2005]

7 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

The only thing I can think of is a short in one of the connectors. Maybe the pins are not aligned properly when the cable was manufactured.

its possible, when i was testing the new cable i would connect just the dvd drive to the cable and power on and the LED was on, when i switched to the older shorter cable the LED was off, so even without a hdd connected the LED stays on with that cable. I currently have the cable installed and its working just fine, I also tested it with cerbios udma5 mode and it works too, just leaves the HDD LED on all the time lol

[lopenator]

just remove the led lol

[Bowlsnapper]

1 hour ago, lopenator said:

just remove the led lol

Nooooo. Just get another cable. I LOVE the HDD activity light.

[lilkuz2005]

5 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

Nooooo. Just get another cable. I LOVE the HDD activity light.

i can't remember where i bought this cable but it was made exactly like the original cable with the connectors backwards from a standard pc ide cable, it fits perfectly in the xbox, just sucks that the hdd activity light is stuck on

 

[Dempsey_86]

Just use the other cable, It isn't seen and the xbox will work fine with this other cable.