Yesterday my wife's Lite-On 32x CD-RW drive died (rest it's soul). Her CD-ROM, which was working, happened to be a match for the silver bezel in my case, so I stole it. I bought her 2 new drives: a Buslink 40x12x48 CD-RW and a Lite-On 56X CD-ROM. The CD-RW set to master, the CR ROM set to slave. Win XP is installed.

Connecting them was the strangest thing. Maybe I was reversing cables, I don't know, but sometimes one drive would show up in "My Computer" and sometimes none. When both finally appeared, I had to shut down, pull the plugs, snap the drives into the case (Antec, no screws) and reconnect. I was extremely careful to put things in the right places, I even marked them. When I rebooted, all did not appear. The 2nd or 3rd try everything finally worked with both drives installed. One showed up as D: CR-RW and the other E: CD ROM. All seemed right with the world.

Toady, the wife tried to back up her Quicken files to CD and Quicken said it was unable to see a CD-RW. She tried to go through Roxio and it said it did not support that CD-RW. She tried rebooting a few times and now all that "My Computer" shows is D: CD-RW and no E drive. If you look at the BIOS as the machine is booting it lists CD-RW, master, ATA 33 and CD ROM, slave, ATA 66. They are attached to the same cable. Also, if you push the button, the CD-RW ejects and reads disks. Meanwhile, the CD ROM won't eject and its red light continuously flashes.

Did you install a new IDE cable ?
You may have damaged the Old cable

Placing the master (cd-rw) on the end connector and the slave (cd) on the middle connector
Then in device manager Remove all the old entries for the cd and the cd-rw ( new and Old drives)
Reboot the system and let Windows find them again

Download and install the drive updates from Roxio
The latest for version 5 are here
http://support.roxio.com/en/support/roxio_support/ecdc/ecdc_software_updatesv5.jhtml

The newer 80 pin ribbon cable
doesn't work on some of these drives.

Sometimes the jumper on both devices
need to be set at Cable Select.

So far the CD-ROM is asking to be
Master. I set mine this way and
go on with it.


RD.

I used 3 different cables before both devices registered the first time (old cable, rounded cable, black ribbon cable that came with my TDK writer). The black one finally worked.

I think everything is 40 pin. I checked the packaging that came with both drives. The CDRW came w/ 40 pin cable for a master & slave. The CD ROM came with 40 pin, but only 2 way connection.

I'll try removing entries in device mgr and rebooting as soon as I get on that machine again.

I've never tried cable select but will go to that after the above.

Once working, on to Roxio.

All is well and thanks for your help. I can't bear to write this twice so please look at my thread in Buying and Upgrading Advice.

By the way, setting both drives to cable select was an excellent idea. Thanks