Mixed Bag Gigabyte/IDE Confusion

[Pseudosilver]

Hello,

I've already read through the Gigabyte sticky, various drive and optical IDE non-detection threads, and have done the basic BIOS tweaking.

New Build: (Win7x64)
GA-X58A-UD3R
msi TinFrozrII (N460GTX HAWK)
8gb XMS3
1TB WD (Sata)
320GB WD (IDE)
random dvd/r from previous machine

Confusing issue:

First build all on my own. Cabling took a while, but everything up and ran. (Both drives and optical). Noticed 1TB was on a Sata2 instead of a 3. After hooking it up to Sata3 I reformatted again. At this point I also notice I've attached my IDE completely backwards (Black to MB, gray to optical, and white to other drive) so I flip that around.

So after all this readjustment, Windows doesn't see either device on the IDE. In BIOS I see both HDDs, but not the optical.

How did I screw up by "correcting" my cabling? Because the optical button works I know it has power. Because BIOS detects the HDD I know the drive has power and is communicating it's presence to the board...right? I've flipped the cable around and swapped cables. At one time I had the machine recognize the optical alone on the IDE which was only slightly less irritating.

Side note: BIOS also says I have no A drive, and I seemingly don't. (The light isn't on, but I don't have any floppies around to check). I mention it in the event it somehow sheds light on the main issue.

I've spent way too much time on this. I would really like to understand what's up.

 

[Pseudosilver]

Since I didn't explicitly say so in the OP: At the first install I could see and use each of the 3 devices. Now I only have the Sata HDD.

Maybe funny note: I had to experiment to get it to recognize the optical alone so I could run a Win7x32 disk, after which I reformatted using a less than legit x64 stored on my ipod. Now that I have a useful OS and have installed all my drivers, I'm back to trying to figure out how to get these other two devices to work at the same time.

 

[Raiddinn]

If I were you, I would start by paying $25 for a new Asus 24x DVD, the same part number as in my signature.

Even if you make only $5 an hour RL if you spent 5 hours trying to get this to work you would be worse off than just buying a new drive.

I can tell you from personal experience that it is not the greatest idea to try to hobble along with old IDE CD drives.

I made that mistake myself and wish I hadn't. I did like you and hobbled along with an old drive from the early 2000s and I had very hard to diagnose problems that just miraculously went away when I disconnected the drive during a change of case and I forgot to plug it back in.

My first thought was that there was no way changing the case cleared up my problem and it was true, I saw right away my CD drive was not connected. I plugged the CD drive back in and the problems happened again right away. Unplugged again and they were gone.

I replaced the drive with the Asus 24x that I mentioned, and the problems stayed gone permanently.

Now, I can sit here and try to assist you with trying to get a few years out of this old obsolete device, but it probably isn't worth either of our time to do so.

Normally, I am not a fan of scrapping things for no reason that clearly work, but that isn't really what we are discussing. If you had no problems, I would say sure keep it till you have some, but we seem to be at that point now.

My advice would be to just swap it out for the one I said and then work on the other HD problem if it still exists after the change.