I unplugged power connections in my PC and just tied up a couple of wires. When I plugged everything back in the BIOS reads my XP 1800+ as 1150mhz. Then no harddrive or CD devices show up. Everything reads "none." After that it says "CMOS Checksum error. Defaults loaded."
I had another good hdd in the house so I plugged it into the IDE cable and that one isn't recognized either. Sometimes I reverse cables and plug them in incorrectly, but I tried all variations so that's not it.

As an aside, all the interior lights (cathodes etc) work, as does the rheobus and all fans.

Break it to me slowly. Did I short or otherwise destroy my mobo? (It's a KR7A-no raid). Also, if the hdd isn't recognized would the CD devices necessarily follow suit? Save a life, respond at your earliest!

I tried setting defaults in cmos and now I still get same processor speed and no disk recognition, but now, instead of "cmos checksum" I get "disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter."

instead of "cmos checksum" I get "disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter."


Well What happened when you insert system disk and press enter ?

Yes it's Very possable you've shorted the Board???

I would take everything out of the case set it up on card board or anti-static material and go from scratch " TO see where it Fails" ?

Yoda:
I took the easy road first and flashed bios by moving jumper over and then replacing it. Then I manually set cmos to return to last config. Surprise, it worked! I amazed myself. But this leaves me with a lesser problem. Only 1 CD drive is recognized When I first boot the bios now recognized the hdd, both both IDE devices say "none." When windows comes up there is a D drive but no E. The regular CD player (D) functions. The CDRW lights up but door won't open. I've checked to see if cable is connected properly and have tried reversing positions on the IDE. Nothing helps.

O. K.

Jump into Safe Mode. Go to Device Manager. Click on the +
mark in front of CD-ROMS.

Click on the Burner to highlite it. Down at the bottom click
on remove.

Shut down PC. Re-start PC and let Windoz recognize a new
IDE device and it will install drivers for it from the
data base.

Now the Burner should be listed as E drive when you click
on My Computer.


RD.

Go back into the BIOS and set all drives to auto.

Thanks much. I used a little deductive reasoning and tried a 2nd CDRW I had at home. It worked fine. A call to TDK tech support determined their unit was bad. I'm returning it for a replacement.

Leading me to another question. I was using a 56 speed CD drive as master and a 32X40X10 CDRW as slave. The TDK tech told me that the CD ROM actually reads at 1/2 speed, which is 26X and the CDRW reads at a true 40X and should therefore be the master drive. Does this make any sense?

I don't understand why a read speed would determine which should be master and which slave. As for your cd rom only reading at half speed, that's dubious at best.

My rule of thumb has always been that a CD/RW prefers to be master. I have always set them as the master, regardless of which drive is the faster. Most Cd roms or DVD roms will be quite happy as the slave.