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Could this problem be the motherboard?

Last response: in Overclocking
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Hi everyone I am having a problem and I do not know what is the cause of it.
I have a 600 watt power supply, asus M3A motherboard,7950, and 2 Gig of memory.

The problem I have is that in windows Xp ( and vista sometimes) my 2 dvd/CD burner drives just randomly disappear a few minutes after windows has started and as you can image this is quite annoying.

Sometimes what happens is when I boot up my pc only 1 drive will literally be on and the other drive will be off. Like there is power only to 1 drive and not enough to power the other. But yet when I go into the bios Both drivers along with my hard drives show up without a problem.

See that's what I don't understand. I have only had this problem with this current ASUS board and with my previous mother board ( it was an ASUS A8n-32 delux), and any other board I have had I have never had any problems like this at all. I just don't understand if this is just a problem within windows Xp, the motherboard, or maybe the power supply. Any advice on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

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i'd say cancel out teh power supply, as it definitely has enough watts to cover it... i'm not too sure about this but could you need a driver for them in winxp? sounds a bit unlikely to me.... the motherboard SATA/IDE connnections could be faulty, or the connections could be not totally plugged in... OR do you have a virtual drive program running? (eg daemon tools) this could somehow cause a conflict with the drives....
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Thanks everyone for your replays! Anyway, yeah I installed a fresh windows xp and vista. Yeah I have just updated the bios also hopefully that will fix the problem or atleast slow it down. I think V3NOM was on to something though. Maybe the IDE and sata cables are faulty. I am going to check that too.

check your bios for boot setting and make sure it is enabled when i first set up my pc my dvd rw drive showed up in the bios but didnt boot it was because it was not setup to boot so just check that
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IDE drives? Jumpers set correctly?
SATA drives? Check your cables. I have been driven crazy in the past with SATA cables which simply would not stay plugged in tightly to the motherboard.

Yeah, I thought of the cables as a potential problem, but they would have to be intermittently bad. I hate those SATA connectors. My gigabyte mobo came with SATA cables with clips on the connectors, they work good.

kls70, one other thing you could do is to turn off the mobo logo screen that covers the POST screen. During POST you will see if the mobo recognizes the drives. If you see it not recognize them even once you will know that it's not the OSs. with two fresh OSs each giving you problems, I would suspect that is the case anyway.

I think I'm going to have to go with the loose/failing cables.
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