IDE Pin Missing

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Alright, here is my problem. I bought a IDE hard drive a while back and used it for a while, its a 200GB from some small company, but it was really cheap, thats why i got it. My problem is that on the IDE connectors, PIN 39 broke off. It's completely missing. I went on a few websites to see what exactly pin 39 is used for, and found out that it sends the 'Drive Active' command. I coulnd't find any more detail on it than that. I'm guessing that if the drive is being used, that pin is sent a 1 bit to tell the computer that its active. I am wondering if anyone knows anything about this kind of stuff. I would really like to use the hard drive, but I don't know if that missing pin will cause data loss or even harm other parts of my computer. I hooked the hard drive up, and it gets recognized fine, and it shows up in windows where I am able to access all of the files on it. So I just wanted some input on whether or not Pin 39 is really necessary.

any ideas? insights? websites I can get more information from?

thanks!
 
The DASP signal is used to indicate the presence of a slave device and show drive activity (HD LED?)

If the HD has a "slave present" jumper then you can use the drive as a master in a two-device setup, otherwise you can use it only as a single master.
 
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