A local friend of mine (who runs the tech shop in town) recently gave me a used ASUS Essentio CS5111. It had been determined that the system's board was toast, although I want to give it a second chance before I use the case for something else. It's a 775 box and from what I gather it can do some pretty good shit... if it boots...
I was given the case and mobo, the heatsinks, the optical drive, and the proprietary drive-power cable. I'm missing CPU and HDD, but those are non-proprietary components that I can source easily... however, I'm missing one elusive damned proprietary cable, and that's the IDE cable that goes from the motherboard to the optical drive. Normally that would be easy to fix, but ASUS decided to pull a Dell here and use some really wacky shit. I think they're too used to building netbooks and laptops.
It's an "FFC" cable -- I'm being redundant, the acronym stands for Flexible Flat Cable -- the thin white ribbon cables with the blue ends. I have NO idea how many leads/wires are inside that cable, I don't know the connector pitch (I can probably estimate it, though, should I need to), etc. I have no information here. My friend says that he can't find it, but "if I trip over it I'll let you know" which means it's gone.
I don't think I can call ASUS and say "hay gaiz a friend liek gave me one of your systems heres teh model can u send me a weird shit cable for it plzkthx" and get anything other than laughter... or the offer to pay for ship-it-to-us extended-warranty service that I don't want and can neither afford nor use.
Small parts (eg cables) are not available on eBay for this system at all, and the complete system or two that IS on eBay... is well out of my price range and would necessarily defeat the purpose of getting *this* one working with as few leftovers and excess parts/expenditures as possible...
I really do want/need that cable, since it's the only real way of using that drive in this system. Anyone have ideas...?
I was given the case and mobo, the heatsinks, the optical drive, and the proprietary drive-power cable. I'm missing CPU and HDD, but those are non-proprietary components that I can source easily... however, I'm missing one elusive damned proprietary cable, and that's the IDE cable that goes from the motherboard to the optical drive. Normally that would be easy to fix, but ASUS decided to pull a Dell here and use some really wacky shit. I think they're too used to building netbooks and laptops.
It's an "FFC" cable -- I'm being redundant, the acronym stands for Flexible Flat Cable -- the thin white ribbon cables with the blue ends. I have NO idea how many leads/wires are inside that cable, I don't know the connector pitch (I can probably estimate it, though, should I need to), etc. I have no information here. My friend says that he can't find it, but "if I trip over it I'll let you know" which means it's gone.
I don't think I can call ASUS and say "hay gaiz a friend liek gave me one of your systems heres teh model can u send me a weird shit cable for it plzkthx" and get anything other than laughter... or the offer to pay for ship-it-to-us extended-warranty service that I don't want and can neither afford nor use.
Small parts (eg cables) are not available on eBay for this system at all, and the complete system or two that IS on eBay... is well out of my price range and would necessarily defeat the purpose of getting *this* one working with as few leftovers and excess parts/expenditures as possible...
I really do want/need that cable, since it's the only real way of using that drive in this system. Anyone have ideas...?