Power up the system. The SCSI BIOS should load and scan the bus for devices. You'll see a message saying that the hard drive is recognized, or not. If the drive is not recognized, with rare exceptions, either the card is flakey, not compatible with your motherboard, or the hard drive is defective. Install the drive and hook up the ribbon cable to the IDE card, or to the motherboard.
Some cables have plastic molding that fits, jigsaw puzzle fashion, into notches of the pin slot.
With these designs, it's not possible to make a mistake. The system does all the work. Just fill this in the blanks. This information can often be found printed on the drive, or the accompanying literature. Then the unit is formatted.