Hi frds,

I connected an external HD to the existing laptop and evrything went well for a moment. when i re started the system the DVD drive is not reading the CD/DVD.the drive is detected under my computer but it doenst read any CD/DVD.

I am not sure whether any thing has changed in the primary and secondary IDE. initilaly the drives were named : C, D & E( CD/DVD Drive). after i had connected the external HD the new drives were C, D, E & F, G where F, G were the new partitions for the external HD.

I tried removing the external HD but it didnt work out as well.

I would appreciate if any one could help me out in this matter

Thanks

Duplicate post,
I am closing the other one.

What's the external HDD connected to?
A USB port?
What other drives?
HDD jumpered and connected as Primary Master?
DVD & CD drives as Secondary Master & Slave?
Primary & Secondary IDE Controllers both enabled?
Are they on-board controllers?
No additional PCI IDE controller card[s] added?
All drives set to "Auto" ["Dynamically Auto-Detect"] in BIOS Setup?
If any new PCI hardware was added, did you "Force Update the ESCD" afterward?
Was/is everything looking good in "Device Manager"?
No disabled "Devices"?
No resource conflicts?

""If any new PCI hardware was added, did you "Force Update the ESCD" afterward?""

Some of them have automatic or manual as the choices. Manual would be what you want to use if this is the case. After saving changes and exiting, the setting goes back to automatic on it's own, no need to re-enter BIOS setup.