Disappearing drive?

[sps]

For some reason, my DVD burner has started showing up in WinXP Pro only about half of the time. It will be not found but it reappears after reboot. It is set as cable select in the slave position of the secondary IDE channel. The CD burner in the master position of the secondary channel always shows up. I never had this problem before with my old rig - it's just been since I rebuilt my PC (Abit IS7-E, P4 2.6C). Aside from the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and power supply, the only other thing that has changed with the new rig is the IDE cable - I needed a longer one for this board. Could this be a hardware problem, or a WinXP problem? I'm getting tired of rebooting in order to use the DVD drive!!

 

[buckmasterson]

Guess I don't understand why you would have it as cable select. I have my DVD as master and my burner as slave.

 

[beatle]

Definitely sounds like a cable problem if it's intermittant. I changed my mb/cpu combo in December and found my DVD drive would not detect all of the time unless it was from a cold boot. I replaced the cable and everything worked fine.

 

[Dufman]

Originally posted by: beatle
Definitely sounds like a cable problem if it's intermittant. I changed my mb/cpu combo in December and found my DVD drive would not detect all of the time unless it was from a cold boot. I replaced the cable and everything worked fine.

that is my guess too, but if it doesnt work it could be a sign of mobo troubles or windows xp problems

 

[sps]

Well, I guess I'll try the cable first since that seems like the easiest possible fix. Hopefully Microcenter has a good return policy for defective cables...... Is this kind of intermittant problem common with bad cables? I've never had this happen before (and I've used some pretty cheap looking cables with PCs at work!).