Slave hard drive in..where's my cdrom drive gone?

[HughMia]

We've just installed a Western digital 40Gb hard drive as a slave drive...all seemed to go well until we realised that it has taken its drive letter to be D: which is a bit of a problem as our cd rom drive (which was D http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif has completely frozen up and wont spin discs. Power is there but there is no sign of the drive in My Computer. I assumed it would nudge along and become the E: but obviously it's not as simple as that!! Can anyone help? Thanks. Hugh

[Jiggy]

hi HughMia, welcome to Pc Guide.

ok, if you are going to put your other HD on your secondary IDE channel set it as master using the jumper at the back, and put it at the end of the ribbon cable, and the cd-rom put in the middle set to slave.
check that your BIOS is set to Auto detect when restarting.
hope this helps.

forgive me, im young. Jiggy

[ski]

If it also does not show up in BIOS, then there's probably a hardware problem. Make sure that the CD-ROM drive's IDE cable is securely and properly connected at both ends if you had to disconnect it to install the new hard drive. Also, try a new IDE cable.

If it's in BIOS, then start up in Safe Mode, remove the CD-ROM drive from Device Manager, restart, and let Windows recognize the drive.