A neighbor of mine wants to add a CD-RW to his PC. He already has a CD-ROM installed. When he installed the new CD-RW drive, the PC would not recognize the new or the old drives.

I went over there and tried to reconnect. First, nothing was working - not even the hard drive. So, I disconnected everything and reconnected one thing at a time - hard drive first. Found the cable connecting the HD was bad, so I changed it. Next, turned on the PC (running Win98) and, yes, the PC started up just fine. So, I connected the old CD-ROM to the IDE Secondary port and tried to start the PC. This time the PC didn't detect either drives and failed to start. So, I tried the new CD-RW drive; same result. Disconnected both again and, of course, the PC starts fine.

Checked and changed cable for the CD drives; same results. Checked pins on MB and on drives; no problems. Checked configuration data, all seems to be enabled correctly.

I am unsure as to the type of MB he has. I'm sure I could find out if that is necessary.

Does anyone have a suggestion?:confused:

Thanks.:)

What size power supply does he have, particularly the 12volt leg. It sounds like he may not have enough power for all of those drives. The other obvious possibility is that they are jumpered wrong...

In the old arrangement, was the CD-ROM connected to the Secondary IDE controller when it worked, or as slave on the primary?

1. In the BIOS Setup, are all the drives set to “Auto” [so they will Dynamically Auto Detect and Configure the drive parameters at every startup]?
If you switch the drive arrangement around, the parameters will not match the drives unless you change the parameters every time, or have the BIOS set them automatically to the correct values.

2. Is the Secondary IDE Controller enabled or disabled? Both Primary & Secondary should be enabled.

3. You need to pay particular attention to get all the jumpers set correctly.
Western Digital HDD’s require a special jumper setting when it is the only drive on the controller.
If he previously had the CD-ROM as the slave to the HDD on the Primary IDE controller, a WDC HDD would require a jumper change when you switched the CD-ROM to the Secondary IDE controller and left the HDD alone on the Primary controller. The CD-RW should be Secondary Master & the CD-ROM the Secondary Slave.