Ive just re-built my machine into a new case (pictures to follow, if I ever manage to put both the sides on).
Everything went fairly smoothly dispite the best efforts of a small monsoon which poored through my living room window at one point and drenched mobo, CPUs and GFX card. Unfortunatly on power on I discovered that the machine would no longer boot up with my DVD-RW drive connected. This has been a pretty extensive project so I thought to myself "if the DVD-RW is all that has died, I have got off ok" and ordered a new one. Alas, the new unit (an ASUS 16x writer from Microdirect) produces the exact same problem, ie machine hangs on POST while detecting drives.
This time I tested the drive in another machine and there is nothing wrong with it. The secondary channel of Chimaeras HDD controler will play nicely with CD-ROM drives (I had a spare which I plugged in while waiting for the new DVD-RW) and HDDs but it seems that a DVD-RW drive causes it to throw a wobbly. I havnt tried connecting a DVD-RW to the primary channel, think I might try that next just to see.
Im using an 80 wire cable with drive configured as Master (its the only one on the cable). I have tried both slots on the cable. The cable works fine with HDDs and CD-ROMs. Any ideas anyone?
Hve you tried playing with the DMA settings in the BIOS (if you can get that far)?
no, if the drive is plugged in she crashes before the BIOS setup would kick in. In any case she worked perfectly with the same drive on the same cable on defaults before I re-built.
Thanks for the suggestion though, Im stumped
Wanna buy a new motherboard? I happen to have one for sale :P
I cant afford to replace my CPUs and Im pretty sure the one you have isnt a Dualie XP board
Motherboard seems to be the only thing that links these two DVDRW drives in terms of their fault.
Cheers
Tongy
I agree, think Im going to have to get hold of a cheap PCI IDE controler. I have a RAID one but it doesnt support ATAPI drives.