Cdrom not recognized/IDE Cable confusion

[Arjay]

I should know this by now, but obviously i don't.

One recently aquired P133
One Maxtor 4.3 HD
One CDRom

For some strange reason the cdrom fails to be recognised by the bios (no operating systems present). I have tried two combinations but none of them work:

1. Using one IDE cable - Set HD to Master - Set Cdrom to Slave
2. Using two IDE cables - Set HD to Master - Set Cdrom to Master

What i was thinking was when i use one cable maybe i am getting the connections round the wrong way, for example:


[Green]============[Grey]============[Black]
IDE1 HD Slave

Should the grey be slave and the master be black?

To overcome this i decided to use two old IDE cables..

[Black]============[Black]============[Black]
IDE1 HD


[Black]============[Black]============[Black]
IDE2 CDRom

So anyway after all that i still can't get the machine to recognized the cdrom. Thinking the cdrom might be faulty i decided to take the cdrom out of my main desktop pc, nope still not recognized! So now i am thinking, it is either me or the machine.

Is there anything in the bios that needs to be enabled to tell it to recognize a secondary drive?

Thanks for any help or pointers..

Cheers

[serz]

Have you checked the BIOS settings?

[DSwain]

Generally under the first BIOS menu there are settings for drive detection (I forget what the submenu is actually called) and in there you should be able to set it to automatically detect the drive or you can possibly manually set it. Now wait do you have both drives on one cable or two? If you have it on two maybe try a new cable for the CD-ROM as it could be faulty. Or maybe even if you're only running one try a new cable anyways.

[retsaw]

I've had a problem like this when the BIOS had settings for a hard drive where I had the DVD-ROM plugged in (as I had previously had a hard drive there), clearing the setting solved it.

Check the jumper setting on the drive, there is normally a label to tell where to put the jumper for what setting. It only matters which way round you plug the drive on the cable if the drive is set to use cable select.

[Arjay]

Still not working, this is just a pure pain in the ***. My current setup is the HD connected to IDE1 and set to Master. The Cdrom connected to IDE2 and set to Master. This Cdrom isn't recognised.

Now i connect a second HD to the IDE2 cable (set to Master) in place of the Cdrom and go into the bios there is an options that goes something like this..

Secondary Drives Present : None

So i open it up and get a few choices..

Options
-------------
[] None
[] 1
[] 2
[] CD-ROM

So with the second HD connected i choose '1', save my settings and boot. Both drives are recognised. Now if i reconnect my Cdrom and choose Cdrom from that same option, it isn't recognised.

Thanks for all the replies so far, appreciated.

Cheers

[Arjay]

From what i have read in the last while it seems that cdroms aren't recognised on old machines by the bios and that you need to install a driver for the cdrom to work, ie Win98 boot disk (didn't work for me though). I've decided to download the boot and rootdisks from slackware.com and boot the machine up with them, maybe that will solve it.

Anyway just thought i would update my post..

Cheers

[Arjay]

Well that didn't work either, i tried booting the machine with the 'bare.i' and 'old_cd.i' bootdisks and neither of them worked. They tried to make an effort to recognize both of the cdroms i tried, a very old one and what around a year old, no success though.

Does anyone have any idea what i should try next? Is it something simple that i have missed? Even in the bios i only have the choice to boot from A and C, not Cdrom.

Thanks for any pointers..

Cheers

[kevinalm]

I gather it's a fairly old mb so I don't know if this applies, but some cdrom/cdrw hate udma. See if you can enter the bios and set the ide mode for the cdrom's port to pi/o4.

Also, make sure that the cdrom isn't a "proprietary" interface, that was designed to be connected to a soundcard or other special adaptor.

[Arjay]

Cheers kevinalm. I managed to get the cdrom recognised by using the bootdisk from Slackware 3.3.

It then asked me to insert the roodisk and press enter. I initially used 'color.gz' from Slack 3.3 and got this message with a screen full of hex numbers and what not..

'Unable to handle kernel paging request'

I then tried the install.1 from Slack 10 and got the same error. I've read some stuff on the error messages that i am getting but i can't really make any sense of it.

Well i am half way there, unfortunatly i am starting to feel like it is all a waste of time for such an old machine. Maybe i'll just take it out back and set fire to it or something.

Cheers