CDROM & CD-RW issue

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bob James
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B

Bob James

The machine is a home-grown Athlon box running Win2K with the latest
patches.

When the machine was originally installed, it contained two hard disks, a
CD-ROM and a CD-RW. The two HDDs were on the primary controller, the two
optical drives were on the secondary. All are IDE. However, a mistake was
made on the jumper settings, and both CDs were jumped as Master.

The installation worked, and the user worked with the machine for a time,
although the CD-RW was not detecting as a valid drive, due to the jumpers.
The user noted that issuing an "eject" command to the CDROM caused both
drives to eject. During this time, the user installed some software,
including Age of Empires.

When the user finally brought the machine in to have the CD-RW looked at,
we discovered the bad jumper settings, and reset the CD-RW to Slave, and
proceeded to get that working. Both drives now work as expected, with one
glitch: When the user tries to play any game that calls for the CD to be
inserted, it fails, claiming that there is no CD in drive E: (the CD-RW),
even though the appropriate CD is in drive D: (the CD-ROM). If the user
places the CD in E:, it fails with the error that there is no CD in the D:
drive.

I have checked the properties of both drives in Disk Manager. Drive D: is
showing as being IDE (Port:1, Target ID:0, LUN:0). Drive E: displays as
(Port:1, Target ID:1, LUN:0), which I'm interpreting as the machine knows
these are separate drives.

Anyone ever seen this behavior, and have an idea for a fix?
 
That initial jumper setting may have affected the way W2k continues to
deal with the 2 drives. I'd try uninstalling both, power down, [see note
below], power up, and reinstall both.

Note: it a good idea, especially if one does much CD copying, to run the
2 CD drives on different controllers. Less bus contention that way,
faster copying (max speed.) You might try swapping the primary slave HDD
and the secondary master CD drive while power's off.
 
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