Fried IDE cable... But somehow still have a working Amiga 1200.

[Rockin' Kat]

So I installed an indivision AGA 1200 VGA card in my Amiga 1200.  I needed to then relocate the hard drive to the space behind the floppy drive. I needed a longer cable, so I bought a longer cable.  

I put the cable in and put everything together, turned it on, got no picture, noticed a burning smell, and as I reached for the power switch, smoke fumed up from the vents and poored over the keyboard and down the back of the Amiga.  GAH!!!!! OH @#$!

So I now have an IDE cable that has one wire exposed as a good length of the insulation on this one wire burned off into smoke and black dusty crap.

On the plus side the Amiga still worked when I put the hard drive back on with the 1inch cable. But I can't exactly close things up with that, so I still need a cable that is longer.

Now my problem is that there is a difference between the two cables. The original one has the connectors attatched to the cable on differnt sides.  But then when I was looking at cables on amigakit.com their cables don't look like the original one I have either.(I'd like to point out I didn't buy the cable I fried from them. I bought it from an ebay seller.)

I just took the attatched pictures to show how cables were hooked up.

[Karlos]

Possibly the cables you were looking at on the AmiKit site were for 40-pin 3.5 inch hard drives? What you want is a proper 44-pin 2.5 inch notebook drive cable.

[amiga1260]

I had the same problem. My HD cable fried and it wasn't a long cable. My HD has also a black pin from it. Th HD works and the A1200 too.

You could replace your HD with a CF2IDE adapter which you connected straight on your motherboard.

I see you have a shield. You could flip over the HD to the other side and use same velcro strips to hold the HD in place.

Do not use that fried cable anymore, throw it away.

[quarkx]

I am not sure if this helps a bit, but I just got an a 1200 form AmigaKit with an Indivision installed. They did not use the Hard drive sled, but mounted the hard drive right to the "lip" of the case. The Cable needed is that which has been "stipped or broken" and they glue a small piece of plastic on the indivision itself, where the hard drive might touch it.
All in all it is quite a tidy and neat mod, which I am going to try on my A600. It's just 2 small screw holes to put into the case. There are mor pictures on my blog.

[Daedalus]

Well, it's very easy to fry the 2.5" cable as it provides power to the drive as well as carry the data. I'd imagine what happened was that it was connected wrongly - dangerously easy to do in an A1200 seeing as there are no guides surrounding the IDE port to ensure you line the pins up properly. I've seen it many times, sometimes it fries the drive, others it just fries the cable. I guess you got lucky.

The side the connector's on doesn't matter - ribbon cables and connectors are designed that way - once you get the pin 1 indicator right, it doesn't matter which side you put the connector on.