Both of the optical drives on my system recently stopped working. They will speed up when a disk is put in the drive, and in My Computer, the icon changes to show that a cd has been put in the drive, but the name of the disk is simply "CD Drive" instead of the usual "CD-RW" or "DVD-ROM". If you double click on the icon you get an error message that states, "Drive H: (or I:) not ready"

My hard drives don't seem to be affected. The hard drives are both on IDE0 and the optical drives are on IDE1. I am thinking that the IDE1 controller is going bad. I haven't checked the cable, but I am not really thinking it is the cable.

What do you think? Should I buy a new board?

Thanks.

Check the cables & make sure they are seated correctly.

Check the jumpers.

replace the cable. It's more realistic to replace the cable than the motherboard.

Also:

Try the drives one at a time (disconnect power and IDE cable from the other). It could be that one is bad and messing up communication with the other.

Also have you installed any new software lately?

Especially games, business software or media players?