Can't get two CD drives to work on XP machine

[Bruce]

Hi there,

I am helping a pal to install a second cd drive to his Pentium P4 running XP
Home.

No matter what we do, we can only get one of the two cd drives to work at
one time.... we have tried various slave/master jumper settings, tried
having one of the drives on the primary IDE slaved to the HDD... And of
course tried both drives on the Secondary cable... one slave, one master....

The facts are :

1/ The drive that works (and can be seen by Windows) is always the slave
device on the secondary cable. In fact, even if only one drive is installed,
it has to be set to slave for it to be accessible. No other position in the
IDE setup will work for either/any CD drive.

2/ At bootup time, if two drives are installed a PXE message appears saying
""PXE-E61: Media Test Failure ... check the cable. And also "PXE-MOF -
existing PXE ROM". It also seems to give a sort of prompt (for a CD boot
device ?) It just says : "CD: "

If only one drive installed as slave, no messages appear.

3/ Either of the drives (the CD/R or the CD/RW) will work in the computer if
it is setup as per 1) above, as a slave on the secondary IDE.

4/ I have checked the BIOS & can confirm that none of the boot devices are
set as CD devices (in case message in 2) above relates to this).

5/ In device manager, no errors appear against the IDE or CD devices...
second drive doesn't appear though of course.

6/ During early boot process, both CD devices are auto defined correctly to
BIOS... ie. as master and slave on secondary cable.

7) One of the drives is a CD/R, the other CD/RW


Any hints ??

Thanks,

Bruce

 

[DaveW]

You might have a bad IDE cable; try replacing it.

 

[Mitchua]

This may be a stupid question but did you set CMOS to auto detect your IDE
drives? Maybe Master is set to a hard drive or something.

--Mitchua