Saturn won't spin discs

[ProgrammingAce]

Long story short, i have a Saturn debugging station that won't spin discs. The debuggers are identical to retail except for a special board, if the board is removed, it should become a working retail saturn. Unfortunately this one won't recognize the cd drive weather the board is in or not. I've got the clasic symptoms of a bad ribbon cable connection to the drive. There is no animation at startup, and instead of yellow blocks at the cd player menu i get red squares. I've checked the ribbon cable numerous times and even replaced it, to no effect. I think this saturn is worth saving as the bios is a pre-release version and was flashed 6 months before the US release. Some of the options are different from the retail version, and there's a debug menu. More details on the unit are here, including pictures:

http://gamerhistory.com/hardware/SaturnDev.html