I installed a DVD-RW drive in my computer as the Primary Slave drive. This computer is a Intel 2.4ghz with an Intel PERL mb, 300watt power supply, 2 hard drives and a CD-RW drive. The video card is an All-In Wonder Pro.

The problem is that the bios doesn't recognize the DVD drive, but WinXP Pro sees it, but can't do anything with it. I can't even open the tray without a paper clip.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Do you have the CD RW and the DVD on the same cable?  They need to be.  The CD RW should be master and the DVD should be slave.  Did you change the jumper setting on them to reflect this?

And are they getting power?  You only have 300watts.  If you added a bunch of other stuff that my not be enough.

SGatr15

Do you have the CD RW and the DVD on the same cable? They need to be. The CD RW should be master and the DVD should be slave. Did you change the jumper setting on them to reflect this?


No they dont. Is the DVD-RW set as slave or cable select.Some drives dont work very well with the cable select or vice versa

Its actually preferable to not have them on the same cable. THis was a way to prevent burn errors back in the day by flooding the channel doing both read and write requests.

While you can have a HDD and a spin drive on the same cable it is bad form and often the cable dont reach.

SGatr15

I had issues with my DVD. Turns out SP2 for XP has some issues. I had to do a complete recovery and not install SP2 and it works fine again. .02 worth.

Primary Master and Secondary Master are the 2 hard drives. The CDRW and DVD are both slaves configured using jumpers

I have a bunch of stuff on a USB hub, but the hub is powered externally.


BTW, it's winXP SP1. I don't think it's a Win problem, because the Bios isn't seeing the DVD drive and windows is.

Some ideas

Try this first as it's software:
Go into the control panel, system. hardware,  device manager, IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, and open whichever IDE channel the DVD is on. Go to advanced settings. Change the transfer mode of the device to PIO mode or DMA mode alternately and see if it affects the drive. Maybe play around with the auto detection to. If you know how you can also mess with the UDMA/PIO settings in the motherboard BIOS, but start with the Windows driver settings.

Swap the cable end between the CDROM and DVD and see if anything changes (checking for cable issues and since you know the cdrom works, if it's a cable issue, the DVD will now work and the CDROM wont). Bonus is if they both work now anyway, in which case, don't mess with it :-).

Check for a newer motherboard BIOS. Also check for the latest firmware for the DVD from the manufacturer's website. They tend to be flashable also and the manufacturer will have a util for flashing it.

So you know, I have a DVDROM that when flashed with the latest firmware, the motherboard BIOS no longer recognizes it, but windows still does and it works. Even though it works still works with the latest DVDROM firmware, I went back to the older firmware (that the motherboard BIOS recognizes) just for safety.

That's weird- usually it can be seen in BIOS, but NOT in windows....

Try putting the opticall drive on the chain as the master- or try it on the chain as a single drive.

I woonder if the 300 W PS can support 2 HD's and 2 optical drives and the video card.


(BTW
Re: the 'won't open' comment, is the molex plugged into the new drive?)