Ide cable

[slinko]

Should every cd rom have an ide cable connected in order to function? when building my computer i followed a tutorial which did not mention them at all. my cd rom is not playing any discs and i wonder could this be the reason?

 

[hunter315]

Your optical drive should have two cables connected to it, a data cable and a power cable. If its a SATA drive it has a SATA cable and a SATA power cable, if its a PATA drive it has an IDE cable and a 4 pin molex power cable. If you dont have two cables plugged into it it wont work.

If you have both plugged in you can narrow it down a bit farther, check and see if your optical drive is recognized in BIOS, if its not then go through and double check your cables to make sure something didnt come loose.

 

[saint19]

Hi newcomer and welcome to the Tom's hardware forum.

With a PATA cable (IDE) you can connect two devices max, so, you need configure your drives as master and slave in order to be recognized properly by the mobo.

 

[slinko]

it does have 2 cables connected, but there is an input at the back that looks like a ide cable would fit. do you know how exactly i can tell if the device is recognized in bios? the device manager seems to recognize it.

 

[saint19]

Enter to the BIOS and look for boot sequence, if you find your DVD drive there, the BIOS recognize this without problems.

 

[slinko]

it shows up as atapi cd rom on the screen which allows you to change the boot device priority

 

[slinko]

what should i do now??

 

[saint19]

^Nothing, your drive is recognized in the BIOS, so the problem is the drive by himself.

 

[slinko]

so its gotta be replaced?

 

[saint19]

^You can try 1st with another DVD drive, borrow a dvd drive of a friend and test you PC with this.

 

[popatim]

what do you mean its not playing any disks?

This could be a simple case of autorun being turned off.
Have you tried going to My Computer and double-clicking on the drive?

If you can see files or it starts playing when you doubleclick it then autorun must be turned off. What OS do you have?

 

[slinko]

autorun is on