Adding another optical drive

[Mr.Terabyte]

Im running on AMD Sempron 2600, ASUS A7V8X-X, 80 gb HARDDRIVE, 1 GB RAM system i currently only have a LG CDRW drive installed and wish to add an addition CDRW or DVDRom drive or DVD burner, but when I do my system wont Boot...i played around with BIOS, but not sure if i did the right thing...so could someone please gve me a pointer? Im really noob with computers plz help

 

[radelli]

check jumpers

did u put them on the same ribbon cable? did u check the jumper on the lg and make sure it is on master, and new on slave?

 

[Mr.Terabyte]

tried it and doesn't work why why why

 

[Nodsu]

"won't boot" means what? A giant red dialog box saying "I won't boot!"? What exactly do you see on the screen?

What did you have in your computer before? What connected to where? What are the jumper settings on your drives?
What exactly did you do? What did you connect where?

 

[Mr.Terabyte]

won't boot, um meaning my computer wont load to windows? sorry i dont know the technical terms and when i enter Bios and goto the 'boot' section it freezes.

I connected the ribbon correctly and the other cable with the yellow, black, red wires from my current cdrw drive to the one i want to connect to, i assigned master slave as 'auto' and secondary slave as 'auto' as well, then i tried switching secondary drive to 'cd-rom' but my computer still wont load up to windows....

 

[Nodsu]

"won't load Windows" means what? The computer screen remains blank and absolutely nothing happens?

You need the yellow-black-red wires (the power) connected to all your drives. Do not connect the ribbon cable to anything that doesn't have power.

Jumpers are little pieces of plastic (and metal inside) that connect pins on electronic devices. There are some on your CD-ROM drives too. Set them so that one device on a ribbon cable is "master" and the other "slave" (the jumper positions are printed on the drive itself somewhere). In BIOS, set all your IDE devices to be "auto".

 

[Mr.Terabyte]

oh sorry, the computer screen is not blank. It just stands on my start up screen (the asus logo screen) normally i see it for 2 seconds then loads to windows, but it stands idle.

so I connect the power cable and ribbon from my existing CDRWdrive to the new drive I want to connect with? and what do I do with the little jumpers u mentioned? do I connect those too? jumpers are the cubed head plastic ones with 4 pins inside correct?

another question from the Bios, how do I know which option sets to under my primary slave i ahve the following options to chose from :

NONE
AUTO
USER TYPE HDD
CD-ROM
LS-120
ZIP
MO
OTHER ATAPI DEVICE

So assuming i chose CD-ROM? and when I connect my new drive i see the same options, shouldn't there be another option for me to select? or do I chose CDROM again? do i set the bios before i connect the new drive? or set it ater, because when i try to set it after i connected the device, it wont even let me change the slave.
Keep helping me Nodsu, Im really appreciating this help and please be patient with me .

 

[Nodsu]

As I said, set everything in BIOS to "Auto"]/b].

If you have a ribbon cable with coloured plugs (blue, grey, black), then make sure the blue end connects to the motherboard, grey to slave and black to master. If you have only one device, then you can leave the other plug empty of course.

If you have an older type of ribbon cable (thicker and fewer wires) and only one device connected to it, then the master/slave stuff doesn't really matter.

A jumper is a tiny rectangular thing, measuring about 2x5x6 mm and it sits on two metal pins..

 

[Mr.Terabyte]

alright good news everything works, BUT now windows xp only detected the new drive and not the old. SO now I only have 1 Drive letter. what happened to the other one?

 

[Phantasm66]

Sounds like you have jumpered wrongly. Try optical drives only as slaves, on seperate controllers. Only have HDDs as masters.