DVD drive not working on the same IDE cable as HDD

[barry-scott]

Hello

I'm setting up a ~4 year old computer for someone, reusing the HDD and DVD drive from an even older machine which happen to be IDE drives. The problem is that the motherboard I'm using only has one IDE connector so I need to use the same IDE cable for both drives.

From what I could gather, the correct way of doing this is to configure the HDD as master, connected with the (black) master IDE connector on the cable and the DVD drive as slave, connected with the (gray) IDE connector on the cable. Set up like that, the computer boots fine from the OS on the HDD and the HDD itself generally works fine, the DVD drive however is detected and shows up as a drive normally would, but does not read any CD/DVD inserted.

I've tried doing it the other way around as well, with the HDD as slave and DVD drive as master but the result was the same. I've also tried replacing the IDE ribbon cable with another one, but again, it made no difference. I'm starting to think the DVD drive itself might be broken (it hasn't been used for years) but I wanted to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything.

Anyone have an idea as to what I could be doing wrong here? If all else fails, I think I'll simply go grab the cheapest SATA DVD drive available when the stores open again and bypass the problem that way.

Thanks!

 

[smorizio]

if old hard drive had windows on it it could be windows hi low filter error. try seeing if removing the filiters in the registry and rebooting gets the cd-rom to work. if not then it two issue. a firmware bug with the drives. or the cd-rom drive laser went bad.

 

[barry-scott]

if old hard drive had windows on it it could be windows hi low filter error. try seeing if removing the filiters in the registry and rebooting gets the cd-rom to work. if not then it two issue. a firmware bug with the drives. or the cd-rom drive laser went bad.

The hard drive actually did have Windows installed. I'll try what you said and let you know what happens. Though from what I understand the hi-low filter error causes the drive not to show up in the device list? Mine actually does, it simply doesn't read any media.

there are jumpers on the old IDE drives, Master / Slave / CS did you set them?

Yes, sorry I wasn't quite clear in the post. When I said "configured as slave/master" I was talking about the little jumpers on the drives themselves.

 

[zdbc13]

Master works best on the end of an IDE cable. Slave on the one in the middle. Make sure Hard drive is set to master, cd to slave. If that doesn't work the cd is probably bad....