Combo Drive not recognised

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike Pitches
  • Start date Start date
M

Mike Pitches

Hi there

I have an issue that is driving me insane!

I've just bought a new DVD/CDR/CDRW combo drive for my W2K PC. It appeared
to physically install ok, and all leads are (I assume) correctly in place.
I have followed the manfacturers advice and set the new drive to "master"
and the existing CDR drive to "slave". The two drives are controlled by a
split IDE cable fixed to the secondary IDE port on the motherboard. I
cann't see anything different that I should have done.

However, when I boot up, the BIOS only sees the newer DVD CDRW drive, and
when windows loads up, agian only displays the info this one.

There is power to the older drive, but is not seen. Any ideas why and how
to fix would be much appreciated.

Mike
 
Hi there

I have an issue that is driving me insane!

I've just bought a new DVD/CDR/CDRW combo drive for my W2K PC. It appeared
to physically install ok, and all leads are (I assume) correctly in place.
I have followed the manfacturers advice and set the new drive to "master"
and the existing CDR drive to "slave". The two drives are controlled by a
split IDE cable fixed to the secondary IDE port on the motherboard. I
cann't see anything different that I should have done.

However, when I boot up, the BIOS only sees the newer DVD CDRW drive, and
when windows loads up, agian only displays the info this one.

There is power to the older drive, but is not seen. Any ideas why and how
to fix would be much appreciated.
Click to expand...
Two possibilities:

1) You're using an 80 wire IDE cable (66/100/133 one) and have
connected the drive jumpered as master to the grey connector which is
in fact for the slave. This happens because some of these IDE cables
have two wires cut for master/slave settings when using drives in Cable
Select mode. Whilst working OK on drives jumpered for master or slave,
they will only work correctly if the drive is on the right plug.
Unfortunately the IDE cables are seldom labelled as CS ones.

2) Incompatibilty. It is not unknown for drives to be incompatible with
other makes and thus not work. It in the old days Conner and Western
Digital Hard Drives wouldn't co-exist on the same IDE channel. A simple
solution is to stick one of the drives on the other IDE cable.

--
________________________
Conor Turton
(e-mail address removed)
ICQ:31909763
________________________
 
Conor

Many thanks for your solution, I tried this and it worked a treat! So a big
thanks to you for that. I will have to remember about possible problems
with IDE cables in the future.

Mike
 
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