[manu08]

Ok, I've got two desktop pc's. One is Alienware, this machine has the Intel D875PBZ motherboard which I believe uses SATA for the hard drives. The other is a Compaq, very old machine, and uses IDE for hard drives. My Alienware machine has already got two hard drives connected via SATA, both 80GB 7200rpm. I've got one hard disk in the Compaq, 40GB 7200rpm. Now the compaq doesn't seem to be powering up so I removed the hard-drive and attached it to the Alienware, along with my dvd-drive, cd-writer & dvd-writer (3 separate physical drives). The IDE cable however is shared with the dvd-writer only. The dvd-writer is detected but is not getting installed and is located under 'other devices' in device manager. The hard-drive however is not detected at all. There is another device located under 'other devices' but is called unknown. I believe that is the hard-drive. I've tried installing drivers for both the dvd-writer and the hard-drive by clicking update driver but no driver was found. The hard-drive is Maxtor & the dvd-writer is NEC. Yes the dvd-writer was working before I connected this hard-drive onto the same IDE cable. I'm using Windows XP Professional. Any help at all would be appreciated. I've got info on the the Maxtor hard-drive that I need to backup to dvd's so I would need both the dvd-writer and the hard-drive to work on the Alienware machine. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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You can have two devices on each IDE cable, but one has to be set as master and the other as slave, take out the devices and look at the end of each device and set jumpers to master and the other as slave. If the hard drive is going to have an OS on it set it to master and any other device to slave.

go into BIOS and auto detect devices

Edited by peter99, 30 October 2006 - 08:08 AM.

[peter99]

You can have two devices on each IDE cable, but one has to be set as master and the other as slave, take out the devices and look at the end of each device and set jumpers to master and the other as slave. If the hard drive is going to have an OS on it set it to master and any other device to slave.

go into BIOS and auto detect devices

Edited by peter99, 30 October 2006 - 08:08 AM.

[manu08]

Yup, changed the dvd-writer from master to slave and worked perfectly. Thanks a lot for the help.