Replaced Sony CDRW with NEC 3500A and system unhappy

BCinSC

Platinum Member
Oct 11, 1999
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Simple optical drive swap. Don't know if drive problem or system problem, but they are not happy together. BIOS says unknown drive and WindowsXP doesn't even see it. Help?
 

BCinSC

Platinum Member
Oct 11, 1999
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That may have been the case, although my solution was a little different. The Sony and hence the NEC were secondary to a Lite-On 48X CD drive. I assumed (I guess incorrectly) that all drives ship with jumper set to Cable Select these days. Regardless, I simply removed the Lite-On from the mix and hooked to cable to NEC solely.
 

ScrapSilicon

Lifer
Apr 14, 2001
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Originally posted by: BCinSC
That may have been the case, although my solution was a little different. The Sony and hence the NEC were secondary to a Lite-On 48X CD drive. I assumed (I guess incorrectly) that all drives ship with jumper set to Cable Select these days.

default is jumpered as "Master" on majority of nib drives( reverse for harddrives..CS for most of those)
 

dunkster

Golden Member
Nov 13, 1999
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So - your solution was to remove one of the devices? But you still have the problem of not being able to use both devices.

If you're using an Nvidia-chipset mobo, try rolling back the IDE/ATAPI driver back to the standard Windows IDE/ATAPI driver. That worked for me, allowing two optical drives as master/slave on the same IDE port. The problem was the Nvidia IDE/ATAPI driver from the Nvidia 5.10 driver set.

Hope this helps!
 

ixoye41

Junior Member
Mar 13, 2005
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I have a similar problem. My drives (NEC ND-3500A and Lite-On SOHD-167T) were both working fine. I had to do a repair installation of Windows MCE 2005 for an unrelated reason (ATI software) and when I got my computer back up and running Windows doesn't recognize the drives as DVD drives, but recognizes them as "Unknown devices" and cannot find the drivers for them. I have tried searching for the drivers manually, but to no avail.
Any ideas here?
 

NesuD

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
4,999
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Originally posted by: ixoye41
I have a similar problem. My drives (NEC ND-3500A and Lite-On SOHD-167T) were both working fine. I had to do a repair installation of Windows MCE 2005 for an unrelated reason (ATI software) and when I got my computer back up and running Windows doesn't recognize the drives as DVD drives, but recognizes them as "Unknown devices" and cannot find the drivers for them. I have tried searching for the drivers manually, but to no avail.
Any ideas here?

Don't remember for certain but when you do a repair XP goes back to whatever version is on your install cd. If it was the original version before any service packs were released than it may have some issues properly recognizing newer drives. update it to the most current service pack if you haven't already and make sure the motherboard drivers are up to date as well.
 

ixoye41

Junior Member
Mar 13, 2005
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I made sure and installed the Rollup 1 for MCE 2005, but it did not chang the situation. I don't think my motherboard is the problem because I can see the drives just fine in the BIOS. It is Windows that I am having trouble with.
I did try to use a method described by this Microsoft support page CD-ROM drive or DVD-ROM drive appears missing after you install Windows XP
but it did not help either. Windows now sees one of the drives as an unknown CD-ROM device.