Help Me!

[palemistress]

So guess what? Instead of a real update, I'm going to ask you all for help. Here's the deal... I have a fairly old system. I haven't updated the BIOS or drivers in ages and ages. Now I have installed a DVD-RW, and Windows XP does not recognize it. After doing as much probing as I could think of to do, I think it's because I don't have any IDE

Comments

[torrid_zone]

on the back of drives, there are these little pins. You have to cover them in specific ways to make the computer recognize them as the "primary" drives, "slave" drives, and the like. You may have it listed incorrectly... I have done that many times.

[palemistress]

You're awesome.

Now how would I play around with these settings? Where do I access these settings?

[torrid_zone]

they're not settings - they're actually physically on the back of the drive. Here's a really awful rendition of what it looks like:

back of the drive has a slot of the power supple plug, a slot for the computer information, and these 6-8 prongs that kind of look like this:

X X X X

X X X X

There will also be a plastic piece that covers up some of these prongs, which tells the computer what the drive should be recognized as. The drive itself should have a sticker on it that explains what combination means what.

Now I warn you - I am totally an amateur - I learned by trial and error and am probably not explaining this correctly. If it doesn't make total sense to you, you'd best ask someone who knows computers before attempting computer surgery!

[minwee]

Look at the drive itself. There should be a diagram showing which pins need to be covered for "Master", "Slave", "Only Drive" and "Cable Select". If you can't make sense out of that there should have been a little slip of paper which came with the drive explaining how to do that.

You can have one master and one slave on each cable and if they aren't set correctly then weird things will happen -- most likely you will only be able to detect one of the drives.

If you only have one hard drive and one optical drive then it's easiest to just connect one device to each cable and then plug them into different controllers so that it really doesn't matter what the master/slave settings are. If you have two devices on the same cable but only one is being detected then try removing the other drive or switching their positions on the cable to see if that makes a difference.

[minwee]

Unless your system comes from the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the IDE controller (also called ATA or ATAPI for reasons that aren't really important) is on the motherboard. Windows XP comes with a generic "IDE Controller" device driver which will work with just about anything, although it may not give the best performance

[palemistress]

Wow, thanks so much. I've since managed to get Windows to recognize the device, but it won't install it.

There are two pieces of uninstalled hardware (?) on my PC... COM3 and the DVD-RW. COM3 shows a code 19 error -- it doesn't have the appropriate drivers and the DVD-RW just shows up as not capable of being installed; code 28.

So now I'm looking for drivers for the COM3 port... I'm assuming it's a port...

[minwee]

Normally you will have two serial ports at COM1 and COM2. COM3 is probably a modem.

[lamneth]

I promise I'll supply a real update really really soon.

So what's your definition of "really really soon"?
:P
Anyway, it was very nice to meet you last night! I see you don't post much, but I thought I'd read whatever you do post.