Optical drive dissapers!

[Dave_McMahon]

Hello I just upgraded my graphics card and now my optical drive disappers from XP!

I though the new graphics card was drawing too much power so I tested a molex with
a multimeter and I still get 5.08volts and 12.23 volts!

Thanks for your help.

 

[technology-sponge]

erm...

power consumption wudnt have nething to do with it. if ur card was indeed drawing too much power, you'd be getting either -

-lockups
-failure to boot
-burnings smells from the psu
-the blue bang of ozone as ur psu fries crispym cinder
-or if it's a good one, ittl just reset

try checking drivers and make sure you didnt knock out the die cable by accident when installing the gpu

 

[Dave_McMahon]

Thank you i tried those and unfortuanalty that did not work! Is there anything I should try? (or should I RMA the GPU?

 

[technology-sponge]

The graphics card shouldn't be directly affecting your other system hardware besides obviously drawing too much current! but that seems not to be the prob...

The most damage a 'dead' gpu would do is cause a failure to boot or a conflict with another piece of hardware due to bios settings.

Can you access your optical drive in dos/linux/a 2nd version of windows (if you dualboot)or any other alternative os?

If so, then its a driver/api/dll issues in windows. Quickest and cheapest way would be to wipe and reinstall from scratch. Or, if you still have your old card, reinstall that to see if the issues has been fixed. If it isn't then maybe your drive is faulty.

If not (from above) then its either a dead optical drive, or some BIOS setting which is incorrect. Having not ahd this problem, all i can suggest if looking in the bois is checlking PCI/Pnp config, hardware assignments/irq, disabling any "graphics turbo boosters"

 

[McPhisto]

A friend of mine often had optical drives going missing and it turned out that replacing the PSU with a more powerful quality one solved that problem.
As you say this has started happening since you've installed a new (presumably more powerful) Gfx card, it is possible it may be a PSU issue.

If you have more than one HDD, Optical drive or any other device that draws power from the PSU, temporarly disconnect anything that you can do without so you can test to see if the optical drive still disappears.

 

[Dave_McMahon]

Going out now but will report when I return Thanks for your help

David

 

[nprevatt]

Did you check to make sure you didn't accidentally unhook the ide cables to the optical drives when in stalling your graphic card?

 

[Dave_McMahon]

Yeah it was just the Motherboard end of the ATA cable disconnected (slightly) must have knocked it when installing the GPU.

 

[nprevatt]

all else fails its normally a loose chord