CD-ROM support on boot

Vilica

Senior member
Jul 27, 2002
413
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I apologize if this question's been answered before, but I've looked around and I can't seem to find anything that might help me. Basically, this is the situation:

I purchased some components to build my own system (specifics later) and now that I've got everything connected (from what I can tell), it POSTs, I have floppy drive support, it detects both my hard drives, but I can't get it to detect either my Plextor 24/10/40A CD-RW or my Lite-On 16x DVD-ROM. I know that the Plextor drive works, as I transferred it over from my old computer. This is a problem because without CD-ROM support, I can't install Windows 2000 Pro. I've created the 4 boot disks for it, I've formatted the hard drive (its an 80gb WD that I just bought, nothing on it... used the WD disk to format/partition it). I'm using a P4S533 motherboard, with a P4 2.26ghz 533fsb, no other problems except I can't get the BIOS to detect my CD-ROMs. Any suggestions? Could my IDE cable be dead? Am I missing a jumper of some sort of the motherboard? Do I need a specific jumper setting on my CD-ROM? I have the BIOS config set to auto, but it tries to detect the "Secondary Master Device... None" and comes back with no device. If I set the Secondary Master Device to CD-ROM in my BIOS, it fails in detecting it as well. This is the first computer I've built, so I'm sort of stumped here. Any comments, answers, links, or whatnot would be immensely appreciated. Thanks for your time.

 

HappyPuppy

Lifer
Apr 5, 2001
16,997
2
71
Make sure the ribbon cable is plugged into the motherboard and the CD drives properly and then doublecheck that the drives are configured for master and slave.
 

Vilica

Senior member
Jul 27, 2002
413
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Did that, and tried the CD drives in the primary and the hard drives in the secondary, it detected both cd-rom drives but not the hard drives. At this point, my thinking is that its either a jumper that I'm missing, or a dead Secondary IDE channel. If somebody would happen to have a pin combination where both their secondary and primary IDE channels work with the P4S533, so that I could compare it to mine, it would be much appreciated.
 

Xavi

Junior Member
Jul 28, 2002
13
0
0
Plextor CD's have not been user friendly from my experience but change the boot sequence in the Bios. Make the CDROM boot first instead of the floppy. Put the Windows Cd in and see if it recognizes it.
 

Vilica

Senior member
Jul 27, 2002
413
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I tried putting the ATAPI CD-ROM first in the boot sequence, the only problem was that there was no device to put first. The only options were "None" and "Disabled". I don't think its a problem with the Plextor CD-RW because the BIOS recognizes it when its on the primary IDE channel. At this point, basically my only conclusion is that the secondary IDE channel is dead, and I'm gonna have to RMA the board and get another one. If anybody has any other opinions, I'd be happy to try them, as I've tried all the suggestions posted.
 

erniecc

Member
Mar 1, 2000
73
0
0
I am not familiar with your motherboard or bios., so this may not apply in your case.

In my award bios, you not only have to set the ide channel to auto for the hard drive to be recogniized, but elsewhere you have to set the ide secondary ide channel to "active" for either hard drive or cd's to be recognized. Could be your problem. Search all the bios settings for something like this. Good luck.