PCTech Forums

Go into the Bios and check the settings for ide one and two. They all need to be set to auto. Looks like they could set to none.

Set your cdrom to master or slave. If you had two cdroms, then it would matter, one would be the master and the other the slave. Cable select is only used by the idiots at Dell (in that case you throw away the IDE cable and get a real one) . Either IDE one or two should work. Blue IDE connector to the motherboard, the grey or white to the cdrom .

Everything is already set to auto in the BIOS.
On IDE one, Windows doesn't detect the drive - I will check whether the BIOS sees it, and post back.
On IDE two the CD drive is detected correctly in Windows and the BIOS (even though it doesn't work right).

Hmmm... if the IDE channel *should* make no difference, and the master/slave jumpers *should* make no difference, then I can exclude the way I have things set up as the cause of the problem - thanks!.

Would you agree that my problem is either:
- The drive itself - i.e. hardware fault (will check whether BIOS sees it on IDE 1, can also try transplanting it into other computer), or
- The drivers/firmware (everything *seems* to be up to date.... I'm running Win XP Pro SP2)

I am not sure if you have two ide cables or one, If you are using a different ide cable for IDE 1 and 2, The one that can't be seen by the system, could be a cable select ide cable.

Examine the cable, there will be a rectangular hole punched in the flat cabling that completely cuts one strand of wire in the ide cable. If thats the case, the unit plugged into it has to be set to cable select in order to be reconized. The middle IDE connector sets for the c drive and the end connector would be the d drive. This is backwards if you have a real cable select ide cable, which has a crossover wire on it.

Sound confusing?? It can be a real riot when ghosting an old drive to a new drive, you could end up with two blank drives and it gets worse from there.

So if you have one of those, I suggest you get rid of it.