# Dell CAb



## devagral (Jan 27, 2009)

I had one Dell 9150 computer and some time back its motherboard had gone kaput. As replacing it was a costly affair, I scraped it and managed to fix a E41MT-ES2L mobo in the cabinet. I used all new components and it is working fine. The only problem is that there are 2 usb, 1firewire and earphone/ recording port in the front panel of the cabinet and a single connector is provided to power all thes things and there is no header in mobo to connect it to. Any suggestions please. Thanks.


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## Tyree (May 10, 2009)

That's one of the problems of using a retail Mobo in an OEM case. You can try to remove the wires from the connector and connect them individually.


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## devagral (Jan 27, 2009)

But how to ascertain which wire belongs to which particular port?


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## MPR (Aug 28, 2010)

Dell is sort of reluctant to publish its pinouts, and to make things worse they often use flat ribbon cables too. 

I use this:

Newegg.com - SILVERSTONE SST-FP32-B Aluminum USB/1394/Audio Panel ( Black )

The only problem with it is if you are transferring data to a flash drive at the same time you are listening to music through the front jacks you can hear the data transfer interference. One of these days I may try shielding it a bit better, or not, as I don't use flash drives a lot while listening to music anyway.


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## Yur (Jun 13, 2009)

You can use a multimeter to measure resistance over the cables to find out which is which. Might be a bit compicated though, because you have to eliminate the posiblity of the fronside PCB interfering with you measurements. It all depends on how much you can see from the wires, where they connect to, etc.

And then of course look up the pinouts from usb, audio and firewire plugs and headers on the mobo.


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## devagral (Jan 27, 2009)

Thanks.


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