Longish story.
My father's system, older pent III 800 Mhz on an AOpen motherboard started acting flaky. He could no longer read cd's from his older Plextor RW drive. It would give error messages etc. I built his system to include 1 hard drive, 1 plextor burner, and 1 plain old cd-rom drive.
I stopped over several weeks ago, and browsed the event viewer logs and it had some errors pointing to one of the disc drives. I don't remember exactly what troubleshooting steps I took, it's been a few months already, but I determined that the Plextor drive was now defunct.
I suggested to my father to order a Lite-on, DVD/RW combo drive which is what he did. My father, who's sharp and an electrician by trade, is unfamiliar with computers so he postponed putting in the new combo drive.
Last week, he called me and said he put in the new combo drive, he matched jumpers and such and the system hangs when it boots. I initially thought he misjumpered 1 of the drives, but he double and triple checked and it's still hanging.
When the new combo drive is set to master on it's own channel, the system boots. When the plain old cd-rom is set to master on it's own channel the system boots. But when we have the combo and cd-rom drive on the same channel, the system hangs.
So it looks like both drives are good, just a problem with either the way they are jumpered, or the cable, or something else.
So, after he convinced me that everything is jumpered correctly, I thought maybe he could try a replacement IDE cable. He went looking for one, and only found some newer SATA cables that are 24" in length. I've read that the IDE cable wasn't supposed to be longer than 18" so my first question is, will the 24" SATA cable cause problems for these 2 IDE devices?
Second question. Is it possible that the IDE interface on the motherboard is borked up in such a way that it will only allow 1 device to work on that channel? I'd assume that if the IDE connection on the mobo was borked, neither device would work. Not just one or the other. Anyone have any thoughts on that?
Yes, I know he can set the cd-rom drive as slave to the hard drive, but he said he was having problems getting the cable to reach both devices....
Any feedback would be appreciated, thanks
My father's system, older pent III 800 Mhz on an AOpen motherboard started acting flaky. He could no longer read cd's from his older Plextor RW drive. It would give error messages etc. I built his system to include 1 hard drive, 1 plextor burner, and 1 plain old cd-rom drive.
I stopped over several weeks ago, and browsed the event viewer logs and it had some errors pointing to one of the disc drives. I don't remember exactly what troubleshooting steps I took, it's been a few months already, but I determined that the Plextor drive was now defunct.
I suggested to my father to order a Lite-on, DVD/RW combo drive which is what he did. My father, who's sharp and an electrician by trade, is unfamiliar with computers so he postponed putting in the new combo drive.
Last week, he called me and said he put in the new combo drive, he matched jumpers and such and the system hangs when it boots. I initially thought he misjumpered 1 of the drives, but he double and triple checked and it's still hanging.
When the new combo drive is set to master on it's own channel, the system boots. When the plain old cd-rom is set to master on it's own channel the system boots. But when we have the combo and cd-rom drive on the same channel, the system hangs.
So it looks like both drives are good, just a problem with either the way they are jumpered, or the cable, or something else.
So, after he convinced me that everything is jumpered correctly, I thought maybe he could try a replacement IDE cable. He went looking for one, and only found some newer SATA cables that are 24" in length. I've read that the IDE cable wasn't supposed to be longer than 18" so my first question is, will the 24" SATA cable cause problems for these 2 IDE devices?
Second question. Is it possible that the IDE interface on the motherboard is borked up in such a way that it will only allow 1 device to work on that channel? I'd assume that if the IDE connection on the mobo was borked, neither device would work. Not just one or the other. Anyone have any thoughts on that?
Yes, I know he can set the cd-rom drive as slave to the hard drive, but he said he was having problems getting the cable to reach both devices....
Any feedback would be appreciated, thanks
