Wierd Problem

G'day all,

If any of yas can figure this one out, it'd be a great help, as its got me completely stumped..

A friend of mine had his computer custom built a couple of years ago, was running fine for a while, but over the past month or so has had a few problems here and there, and he decided to re-format it.

When he pulled the case apart, he's found that a few of the power plugs were really streched out, and so he's changed them around to tidy things up.

With the primary HDD reformatted, things seemed to be going well enough, but then when he re-started it next, none of the optical drives (One CD-R/RW and one DVD-ROM drive) were being picked up in BIOS, and didn't work outside of.
When starting up though, using an old '98 bootdisk, it seemed to pick-up that the CD drive was there, but couldn't do anything with it.

We've sat down, tried plugging things back the way they were, check all connections etc, but nothing is coming from it.
Has anyone got any ideas where this has come from, what to do?

Thanks in advance,

Pottsie

i would only suggest that it could be a mainboard issue - eg the IDE controller.

is the slave/master thingy set up good?

are the drives just past their used by dates?

G'day,

Updating whats going on here, and its no better.
IDE Cables have been checked, jumper settings are fine, dust removed, everything worked for a few minutes.
Then I went and tried to start installing XP, it hung on itself, so I restarted.

Once it'd restarted, it couldn't find either of the drives - What the holy hell?? :shock:

Delta - I'm starting to think it could be the mobo thats rooted, but figure I'll get the opinions of those in the know first.

Cheers,

Pottsie

try the drives in another computer, on the same cables..

G'day,

Updating again - One drive can work at a time at the moment, and it seems fine with that.

Separately they work (IE: One at a time will go with no problems) but when you try running both at the same time, thats when things fall apart.

Thanks for your help so far.

Cheers,

Pottsie

when u say the jumpers are fine, what are they set to?
brand/models of optical drives may or may not be helpful...

which drives are slave/master and which parts of the data cable are plugged into which drive as well?

my first thought would be that one of the 2 optical drives are, as apples put it "just past their used by dates" in that they are faulty in some way that is causing interference on the ide chain that they are plugged into

a good test to try, which would require a little extra effort, set the optical drives both to slave, and try each as a slave on the primary (hdd as master, optical as slave) if 1 of the drives cause the hdd to "stop working" or disappear or something, i'd put my money on that one being at fault

G'day,

Final Update (Computer has gone back to its owner)

Having put XP back onto it, set the lot up etc. for some unknown reason they're both working together now.

There was a CD-R drive set as the secondary master, and a DVD-R drive set as the slave (This has been reversed) and now they both seem to be going fine.

Thanks for your help though, much appreciated.

Cheers,

Pottsie

yeah dvd gotta be in charge! (master)