Two cd drives will not work on one 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

 

[Millard]

-----Original Message-----
What are the Brands and how old are these drives?

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Pentium P4 running
XP slave, one
master.... one drive is
installed, other position in
the message appears
saying work in the computer
if defined correctly
to

devices set up for a boot device after FLOPPY DRIVE, DRIVE
C, and then CD. Something else to look at is what kind of
IDE cables are you using on the CDs? If you are using the
40-pin cables the IDE will set it as slave. Try the 80-pin
cables and the IDE will recognize it as a MASTER therefore
you can have a MASTER CD-R and a SLAVE CD-ROM on the same
cable plugged into the secondary IDE slot on the
motherboard.

 

[D.Currie]

Try a different cable.

 

[D.Currie]

devices set up for a boot device after FLOPPY DRIVE, DRIVE
C, and then CD. Something else to look at is what kind of
IDE cables are you using on the CDs? If you are using the
40-pin cables the IDE will set it as slave.

Not true at all 80-pin cables are relatively new, and have little effect on
CDs. For all the years we had nothing BUT 40-pin cables, people have been
setting CD drives as master with no problem.

Try the 80-pin

 

[Mike S.]

I have the same problem, I had to have 1 cd drive and hdd
on the primary and the same for the secondary, but what
fixed my probem was buying a top quaility power supply
box and then more than likly your problem will go away.

Mike