POST Lite-on CD-RW errors with ide HD / fixed / new errors

[Sonu]

I have a PII 400 running Win2k, with SCSI hard disks, and a Ide CD-Rom on Primary master, and Lite-On 12x10x32 on Secondary master (jumper select). No IDE hard drive. The manufacture date of my Lite-On 12x is March 2001. Firmware is LS38. I have been using the above configuration successfully for about a month.

Last night I added a new ide hard drive. I gave the primary master to the ide hard drive, and moved the cd-rom and cd-rw to the secondary master and slave (jumper-select). The bios had problems recognizing the cd-rw drive on post, and would stop the boot process, asking me if the cd-rw had been removed, and to check if the cables were connected properly.

After numerous trials & combinations (cable-select, CD-rw-master, cd-rw-slave), the one that worked was if cd-rw was secondary master, and not sharing the channel. No other combination worked, as far as I remember. I was up until 3:00am trying to fix this problem, so I might have missed some combinations .

The Lite-On website being unavailable all this time did not help.

I will be adding an IDE DVD-Rom in the next few days, and am concerned about how I would go about connecting all these devices. I do not want to share my udma-100 hard-drive on the same channel as these slower cd-drives.

Any suggestions on how I could fix these problems. Is there a new firmware that I should try? Since I hear that there are two hardware versions available, will exchanging it for a newer drive help (the store might let me exchange for the same drive if I tell them this one is defective)?

Thanks.

 

[Sonu]

The problem got resolved by removing all ide devices, waiting for POST to complete and update the BIOS, and then rebooting. Then added the ide devices back. Did not need to upgrade the firmware.

Hard Drive on primary master (primary slave unused).
CD-RW on secondary master, & CD-Rom on secondary slave (jumper selected).

Btw, my Lite-on version is the 12101B.

However, Now I am having a different problem. The computer booted up with the HD with ultra-dma, the cd-rw with dma, but the cd-rom was PIO. I selected "use dma if available" for the cd-rom, and rebooted. Win2k froze during bootup. Removed both cd-drives and rebooted - worked. Put the cd-drives back - Froze again. Set the bios to "PnP operating system", instead of the bios selected and allocating the resources (Was using NT until a few months ago, so this was a legacy that I had not changed). System booted fine, but the keyboard and mouse froze 10 minutes into the session. Rebooted - working fine, but need more testing.

I am clearly having a DMA conflict. Any suggestions on how I would go about resolving this?