[Hockeydad]

Hello, I'm new to this forum and I appreciate any help I can get. I have a Athlon 650 mhz machine with about 350 meg of ram. I just got it up and running again as it was sitting around. It had a cd rom and a 4x burner in it . They both worked fine. I was having toruble with the doors opening on both drives so I decided to replace them. I had two drives that were very similar to the ones that were in there, just laying around so I put them in. The doors open fine, XP says the devices are working properly, but when I insert a disk, nothing happens. I've tried to uninstall them and install new drivers but nothing! I installed Service pack 2 thinking that might do somthing ( by the way I just did a fresh install of XP) and that didnt work eather. I've tried all I can think of and dont know what to do. Everything else on this machine works great but the cd drives. I also tried to change the settings in the bios reguarding the drives and that didnt do anything eather. Please help, Dave

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Welcome to G2G, Dave

Can you explain what you mean by 'when I insert a disk, nothing happens'?
Does the drive attempt to access the CD at all (i.e does it spin up)?

[Samm]

Welcome to G2G, Dave

Can you explain what you mean by 'when I insert a disk, nothing happens'?
Does the drive attempt to access the CD at all (i.e does it spin up)?

[Hockeydad]

I just inserted a disk into both drives, and The light on the drive blinks but I dont seem to hear the drive spin. Then the light stops blinking and nothing happens

[Samm]

OK, so after inserting a CD & waiting for the light to stop blinking, what happens if you open My Computer & double click on the relevant CD icon? (If you're not absolutely certain which icon is for which drive, then try both icons obviously)

[Hockeydad]

When the light stops blinking, If I click on the cd rom, it says to insert a disk. If I click on the cd burner it goes to the screen where the cd program should be, but the screen is empty. There not acting exactly the same but still, neather works.

[Samm]

I assume you have tried a selection of different CDs in both drives in order to eliminate the discs themselves being the problem, right?

Out of interest, how did you manage to perform a fresh install of Windows if neither drive will read CDs?

[Hockeydad]

Yes I did try diffrent cd's and no change. And I loaded XP with the old drives that I described in the original post. They worked but I was having all kinds of problems with the doors opening, and not wanting to give the cd's back. I was just changing them cus they were giving me problems but they read fine once they took the cd in. By the way I tried to change the cd rom and the burner quite some time ago, not for the same reason but just because I wanted to upgrade them, and I had the same result. So, I just put the old ones in and it worked fine. Now I have a real reason to replace them and for some reason I cant. Wierd

[Samm]

That makes sense. I thought from your original post that you had performed the frsh install since changing the drives over!

Can you confirm that both optical drives are on the same cable? (ie. both on the secondary IDE controller)
If so can you please tell me, for each drive, what you have set the jumper configuration to for the master/slave/CS selection & whether the drive is attached to the connector on the end of the ribbon cable or the middle of the cable.

[Hockeydad]

I hooked up the new drives exactly the wat the old ones were, Master , slave, same IDE cable locations. I was wondering, do you think I should try to change Master, Slave designation between drives? Also, does it matter which drive , eather master or slave goes on which end of the IDE ribbon? I meen, should the Master drive be on the END of the IDE ribbon or can it be in the middle? Or dosnt it matter.

[Hockeydad]

both drives are on the same cable IDE2

[Samm]

Re. the positioning of the drives...
If you are using an 80 wire IDE ribbon cable (i.e one that supports ATA-66 & ATA-100), then the Master drive must be at the end of the cable.
If you are using a 40 wire IDE cable (i.e ATA-33 only) then it doesn't seem to matter so much. Personally, I tend to stick to the same configuration as used for 80 wires cables.

OK, please try the following steps, one at a time, in this order:

1) Boot up in safe mode. At the Run..command, type devmgmt.msc & click OK. Expand the CDROM devices branch & delete every entry for the optical drives then shutdown the computer & proceed with step 2.

2) Rather than swapping the two drives around, I would suggest instead that you configure BOTH drives to CS (cable select).
Also double check the connection of the ribbon cable to the motherboard - make sure it is fully & evenly inserted into the motherboard at both ends of the connector. Go to step 3

3) Power on the system & go into the bios (usually by pressing the DEL key a few times as soon as the monitor LED turns from amber to green).
In the bios, in the main page or first page, make sure that the Secondary Master & the Seconday Slave are both set to AUTO & any other settings for these two devices, such as Drive Translation, are also set to auto. Save the changes & exit the bios.
The system will now reboot. Watch the screen carefully to make sure that both optical drives are detected.
When Windows loads, it should find the 2 drives & place them back into device manager. Test them both again with a known good CD (preferably not a copied CD) & see if there's any improvement.

4) If theres no improvement so far, then go back into device manager (devmgmt.msc) & delete the optical drives again. Shut down & physically remove one the drives. Make sure the remaining drive is jumpered as Master & is connected to the end of the cable. Boot up & test the drive again.

5) If this still doesn't work, then repeat step 4 but using the other drive (again, jumper as master & attach to end of cable).

6) If none of these measures make any difference, then try a different ribbon cable.

[Hockeydad]

Thanks very much for the advice, I will try it over the weekend and get back to you.