I'm in over my head............

Blitzkrieger

I'm trying to fit a CD-RW drive for a friend and I've totally messed up his computer!

I've actually done this (installed a CD-RW successfully) twice before so I thought I'd be alright, but once I saw it was a Packard Bell I should have known not to mess with it.

Basically I set the jumper, bunged it in and made sure all the cables were nice and tight. The difference between this and other installs was the IDE cable had just one port on it, so I put in the one that came with the CD-RW.

I booted up the computer and it's asking for a boot disk - it seems it can't find the HD or any of the CD-R drives. The cables are definitly tight and the BIOS is set to auto-detect and I'm too much of an amateur to try anything different.

I tried reversing what I had done but it had no effect - it still can't find the HD.

I'm thinking the solution would be to upgrade the BIOS and hope that does the trick, but I don't know what BIOS I should be looking for (it's an old Pentium 2 350).

Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Red Moose

OK, 2 IDE channels, each with 2 ports, total 4 possible palces to attach the drive.

HD should be set to Primary Master. Assuming no other CDROM drive, teh CDRW should be made Secondary Master, or Secondary Slave if there is another DVD/CDROM or something. Basically keep the HD (typical source for burning) on a separate channel to the destination (CDRW).

If the IDE cable has only one port (other end in the motherboard IDE-2 channel).

Now, of course the HD had it's own IDE cable all along, so use that one alone to connect the HD to the IDE-1 channel alone.

If the CDRW came with a cable with just one port (not the extra one say half way along the ribbon), forget the original CDROM drive for the moment and use that cable to plug the CDRW into the IDE-2 channel as teh Secondary Master.

It's pretty straightforward (I think). One thing you might want to do is to make sure that the BIOS IDE channel information is actualy ALLOWING the use of the extra port. My Gateway system had the second channel disabled in the BIOS when I got it, and the HD and DVD running off the IDE-1 Master and Slave. There is an option in most BIOSs to enable and disable the four ports individually.

Also, did you make sure that the HD is set to Primary Master using the hD manual (or if not, get the manual off the net from the manufacturer). It might have been set to something odd in the first place; you never know Packard Bell.

Fand

What he says. And just in case, buy a new cable and try that

One thing to remember is that CD thingies just are not happy as slaves. All God's chilluns need freedom.

They prefer life as secondary IDE master, for their own good reasons.

Not an invariable rule, but pretty usual.

Blitzkrieger

The HD was the primary master and I never touched it Guv'. The original CD-ROM drive was the secondary master, and it's IDE cable had just the one port. I replaced this with the cable that came with the CD-RW drive that had two ports on it, and later took out the CD-RW drive and put back in the original cable.

The BIOS had listings for primary and secondary master and slave all set to 'Auto' detect. The problem is it doesn't seem to be detecting any IDE devices at all (apart from A: ).

_CreeD_

There should be a clear CMOS jumper on the motherboard somewhere, give it a go. It will hardware reset the BIOS to defaults, it sounds like it just went a bit loopy when trying to configure the new device.

beaver

Try:

Primary Master: Hard Drive
Primary Slave: -
Secondary Master: CD/RW Drive
Secondary Slave: CD-ROM Drive

When you've installed them, head into the BIOS and auto-detect the IDEs.

HTH,
-Ross

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When I was young my mother told me not to look into the sun; so once, when I was six, I did...

Blitzkrieger

Eventually solved it by trying just about every combination of IDE cables and devices there was. Something must have caused the BIOS to look twice or something. I hate it when a problem disappears b4 u solve it

seamus

It was probably all in the setup - yesterday I was re-attaching my cd-rom so i'd have 2 hds and cd-r & cd-rom. No matter what i did, when both CD drives were plugged in , neither could be seen. The problem was that the cd-rom drive refused to be the slave, and once it became master everything worked!! so that coulda been your prob - just in case you ever go fiddling again

elexes

h8 those lil probs . but rember if it aint broke dont fix it

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what type of world will we live in when there is no world ?

LoLth

or

if it aint broke..

break it.
Fix it
be considered a god
get paid.

Gerry

To be honest, it varies from machine to machine. Slaving the writer from the hard drive cable seems to work best for me. On many amd systems, the writer doesn't seem to work well if it is on the same cable as the cd/dvd drive, even if you aren't doing direct cd copying.
Just my experience. Also, as blitzkrieger has found out, the type of cable makes a huge difference. I generally stick with the older 40 pin cables for cd drives. Again, only some machines are sensitive to this, particularly machines with the via 686b southbridge.