Second CD-RW Slave Drive Crashes Boot

Hey all. I've tried searching the forums in hopes of finding the problem but to no avail. I'm using a Win XP computer with just a regular CD-ROM drive as a master on one IDE cable. I made sure that CD device was set to master and sure enough it is. I tried to install a second drive, a cd-rw, to the same IDE cable as a slave. I made sure that was set to slave and it is.

The problem occurs when I try to boot the computer. It hangs up saying 'checking for nvram (i think, may be ndram)'. I notice that the LED's on the regular cd-rom drive blink on startup but the cd-rw LED's do not light up. I tried making the cd-rw a master and taking away the original cd-rom altogether and that does not work either. So I'm guessing it has to do with this cd-rw drive. I unhooked the cd-rw drive and put the regular cd-rom drive in and everything worked fine again. (Making sure to switch the master/slave settings each time I unhooked one drive or the other).

Is this a problem that can be fix or does it sound like my cd-rw drive is dead? I've had it since 2000 I think. Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thank you.

-Matt

 

Thanks tony. Must be a bad drive then because the bios is set to auto detect. Sorry I failed to mention that piece of information. Thanks for the reply!

 

I think your tests would suggest it is faulty, although you could try running it alone as slave or on the CS (Cable Select) setting. If CS worked, set both drives to CS.

Only other possibility is to see if a firmware update program might "see" the drive (look up the drive's model number at the manufacturer's website). Even that would probably not help.

Matt

 

Change the Jumpers on the back of 1 of the drives

I had the same problem. Two optical drives and system crash.

The solution for me was to change the jumper on the back of the slave drive. I don't know if its universally true, but if both of my drives were set to the same jumpers they'd compete for an IRQ and the system would crash.


Cheers

 

Thank you for the suggestions everyone. I will try them out hopefully tomorrow and post any results. Thanks!