strange drive problem

My dad tried to install a cdrw, it couldnt be found by bios or windows he also had a dvd rom and since he tried to install the cdrw the dvd rom dissapeared also he gave it to me to look at and all i done was removed the wires from the dvd rom and put them back in to make sure they were in right. Now the hard drive isnt being detected and all wires remain intact. Its an AMD athlon XP 1600 and now its getting on my nerves the bios will not detect any of the drives now and all wires are in properley its like when u do something to something else the other things are going off.

 

Quite likely the reason the hard drive has gone away is that you accidently hit or moved the ribbon cable to it when re-seating the optical drive cables. Re-seat the cable for the hard drive at BOTH ends, drive and mother board.

On the CD DVD drives I would suspect that the origional DVD ROM was set to master and so is the CDRW. You can not have two drives on one cable set to either master or slave. One of them must be slave and the other master.

I would recommend setting the CDRW as master and the DVD ROM as slave. On the label side of the drives there should be a little chart showing how to set for either. Where you do the setting will be on the same end of the drive as the cable. Look for a short double row of pins. There will be a plastic piece made of plastic that is called a jumper. Move it to where the chart says to make master/slave.

 

IN addition to Jays recommendations, make sure none of the drives have been set to "cable select" and are all actually a Master or Slave. Also with the drive data cables, some of them require you plug the Master into the connection furthest from the motherboard, and the slave on the other, and wont work out of order. Also check you have the striped side of the data cable closest to the power inlet on the drives.

 

Dez Bradley is very correct in what he says! I am a bit embarassed that I didn't mention some of what he did. Especialy the cable select!!!!!

I HATE cable select. Just set the drives to what they should be, master/slave. In MY mind I took my telling you to set master/slave as covering cable select. I "took it for granted ". I should of mentioned it just because you would see it there on the chart.

Dez,

Since I Never use cable select I've never concerned myself with the position on the cable. I've even have the hard drive on my main system on the first connector on the IDE cable. Just the way it fit better for air flow. I've never had a problem. Have I just been lucky? And thank you presenting it. I never gave it a thought.

 

No the position of drives on the new type 80 cables (well not so new any more) is not the same for all of them. Its hit and miss. Some will not care what interface you plug the Master into and some require you to only plug it into the topmost one.

Also happens that in some rare cases, if you have a CDROM set as MAster on the second IDE controller that the Primary Master drive wont like it. But this is rare and a compatibility issue that was more common in the past.

 

re

Thankyou so much got it all running now, the cables seem to loosen very easily on that system never had that prob on my pentium So I set the DVD to slave and the cdrw to master then I went into bios and it found all the drives and saved the settings with F10 now its all working nicely. Thanks very much guys My dad is all happy now will probably have to learn him how to burn next pmsl