Secondary IDE Problem

**VaioViper** · August 5th, 2004, 10:15 PM

I want my computer to have 2 Hard Drive’s and 2 CD-Rom's. I placed the 2 Hard Drive’s on the Primary IDE Connection and set the jumper on my primary drive to Master and the secondary drive to slave. Then I connected the 2 CD-Rom's to the Secondary IDE Connection and set my CD-Rom as Secondary primary and my CD-RW as my Secondary Slave.

My Secondary Connection has never been used before this attempt.

I booted up and went into my BIOS and it detected my hard drives on the primary connection but it didn’t detect the secondary drives at all. I looked around for a place in my bios to maybe enable the Secondary IDE but came up empty.

So I was wondering what is going on? Is the Secondary IDE dead? Is there a way to correct this?

**LeftCoast** · August 5th, 2004, 10:28 PM

You may want to try updating the IDE drivers, from the manufacturer's site.

**OuTpaTienT** · August 5th, 2004, 10:34 PM

Typically the bios does not recognize CD drives the same way it does for hard drives. As long as you have the secondary ide channel enabled (should be somewhere in your bios there or maybe it's always enabled) you should be fine. Windows should recognize the CD drives and list them in the Device Manager.

**John Prophet** · August 5th, 2004, 10:52 PM

I prefer to have the burner as the primary.....

check in the device manager and see if the drives show up

in the bios it may not auto detect the cd-drives...sometimes you may have to set the secondary pri and slave to "cd-rom"

**jmichna** · August 5th, 2004, 10:59 PM

Could also be something as simple as a bad data cable for those secondary IDE devices, especially if not detected in BIOS. Is the cable connected properly, and fully seated at the two opticals, and at the mobo connector?

If you temporarily remove the two opticals, and connect your second HD to the second IDE channel, does it get detected?

**LeftCoast** · August 5th, 2004, 11:02 PM

Originally Posted by John Prophet

I prefer to have the burner as the primary.....

Dell seems to do it differently, as every computer I've ordered thruogh them has the cd-rom od dvd-rom as the master. i didn't think it ever mattered, but since noticing this, I've followed suit...

**John Prophet** · August 5th, 2004, 11:07 PM

Well they probably sell more comps with just the cdrom or DVD as opposed to 2 drives...so they probably just build everything with the cdrom or dvd in position one and then add other drives as necessary.

I have always understood it that the primary drives gets some priority over the other drive so I would put the burner there...of course if one watched lots of dvds and only burned cds once in a while it might pay to have the dvd on as primary.

Then again, with the speed of things today it probably doesnt matter much either way, lol