CD-RW drive not detected

[scarla]

My machine is a Dell Dimension XPS D300. Currently I have no OS loaded- here's some background:

About 2 weeks ago my Maxtor 4GB hard drive crashed and I ordered a new one- exactly like it. I installed it and with some help from Maxtor phone support I verified that it is set up properly and ready to load Windows (I want to load Win98se and that was what I was using before my crash).

Prior to my crash, I noticed that the tray on my HP 9150i CD-RW was starting to open on it's own at various times and sometimes I would have to reboot to get it to work properly.

So, I get ready to load Windows and although my BIOS recognizes my HD on Primary IDE Master & the HP CD-RW on Secondary IDE my CD tray is going nuts- opening and closing at will. I could load the win98 drivers and the assignment would be "D:" but any type of command at "D:" resulted in a "CDR101" error saying it wasn't reading that drive.

I checked all connections and they were secure, tried 2 different new data cables, red lines are matched up with Pin1 on motherboard and device, tried all three jumper settings, IDE settings in BIOS are set to "auto" and I also tried the "CDROM" setting. IDE also enabled as "Both" in BIOS. At this point, I contacted HP support. After going back and forth a few times he said it sounds like a hardware problem and that I should contact them by phone for my "options". Well, they're too busy with the Blaster virus to answer calls and I can only imagine what my "options" would be- so, I bought the Universal BusLink 52x CD-RW drive that Staples had on sale. My machine is a Pentium II, 300 mHz, 4 GB hard drive with 256 mb RAM and appears to fall within the system requirements for this product.

No luck. Installed the new drive and now my BIOS will not detect it at all. New cable, good connections, lined up properly. Then I email Dell and they say I need to flash my BIOS. It has the Phoenix Bios 4.0 Version 6 A08 and I updated it via their instructions to A09. Everything seemed to update without a problem and now on power up it's noted as the A09. But, still does not detect my CD-RW! I've tried all jumper settings and no jumper settings, different cables... and when Dell suggested it was the new CD writer I returned it and tried another one. Same deal.

I've also switched the hard drive around and it's recognized on the secondary IDE master and I've switched the data cables- all is in order.

I sure would appreciate any suggestions as to where I go from here. I've been working on this and trying to find info on boards for over a week.

Thank you.

[John Prophet]

Did you try the cdrw on the Primary IDE cable..just to see if your bios recognizes it?

Maybe the secondary controller is going bad..maybe it likes IDE stuff but not ATAPI (cdrom) stuff.

Maybe you could just use the Primary IDE with the hard drive as master and the CDRW as slave.

Some other options do exist, like buying an ATA controller card (in case your secondary IDE controller is bad)....lots of them are floating around now where peeps buy these huge hard drives that come with the ATA133 cards but they dont need the cards.

JP

[scarla]

Thanks for your suggestions. I did try switching the data cables and the devices on the different controllers. The hard drive always shows up and the cdrom does not. I have not tried setting them up together on one controller and one cable- I'll do that and see what comes of it.

I also appreciate you mentioning the idea of the ATA controller card. I don't know anything about them but, I'll go study and see if that might be a good idea for me. As it is, I have 2 weeks into this project and my husband just informed me this morning that if he realized we could have replaced it for a more powerful machine for less than $500. he would have agreed to do so! I just want to use a computer- not build one.

Thanks again- I'll post back.