Just got a BUSlink CD-RW to accompany my CD-ROM (it was the cheapest thing we found, and my roommate said I could keep it after he finds a new place to live ), installed it as secondary slave but it was not recognized in BIOS or Windows. I swapped out the old CD-ROM for the RW, and it works fine. Is there something I'm missing? It doesn't make sense that it would be recognized as a master, but not as a slave....is it possible that the cable is messed up so the master connection works, but slave doesn't? I was getting power to the drive, but couldn't use it.

thats strange .
I have a cd rom & cdrw on my secondary ide
cd rom cdrw is master & cd is slave
I'v also install them the other way around . so I don't know what to tell you .
just make sure one is set to master & the other to secondary end of story ..

you are ajusting the jumpers on the back of the drives correct ?

yes.
it may be that the ribbon is screwed, or i might not have had it connected fully, but i was kinda not in a condition to mess around with it too much for fear of breaking something. The secondary connector was in a tight place, so i just decided to swap the drives for the time being. If i get really bored I'll shut down and try again.

Sounds like your cable..

shot in the dark . . . maybe it's a jumper setting on the drive, I heard that it's best to take it off CS and manually put it on a slave or master . . . don't know if you did that yet though

Yes I did...as I said to Slammer. It was originally set as master rather than cable select, and I changed it to slave. I'm assuming that if the jumpers were set incorrectly I would have gotten an error instead of it just not being recognized.

I would do it again once your sober LMAO you might have been seeing backwards or something LOL

Nah it would have not recognised one, or it could have also thrown out an ATAPI error. Mine did that when I upgraded to the new motherboard. I had to strip them down and push the pin back in a little harder once that was done it worked fine.

if it's a problem with the cable or jumper setting I don't think any error message will come it, it just won't work . . . did you try a different port to connect the cd-rom to?

A different port? There are only 2 IDE channels, primary being reserved for hard disk, so no I didn't (if that's what you meant). All I've done so far is what I stated above....haven't bothered trying again yet, as I don't necessarily need both drives. I'll get around to it sometime in the next couple of days...or weeks...

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confJumpering-c.html
I had problems when I installed my current burner with my 36x CD. I think from (foggy) memory I ended up having my standard CD drive as master, and interfacing it through the sound card's IDE. Put the burner on its own cable on the mobo. That worked. Sound card IDE tends to be a bit slower, so not optimal, but what the hey.

just don't do what the guys that assembled my puter originally did, and put the CD and HDD on the same cable.. improved performance dramatically when I removed that setup (not that you would..)

*blushes* sorry, yes I meant channel but at the moment for the life of me I couldn't remember the word channel *goes and hides in a corner*

I still would have wondered what you meant, as I'm not sure if they are called channels or slots or whatever....just know they're IDE.

Sound card IDE, that takes me back...

How old is your pc Tink?

er.. uh.. Retro is cool ya know!

I take it newer ones don't have those? Okaaay..

After a month, I finally got around to opening the case....just put in a new ribbon, and it works fine =o)
Thanks for the feedback, folks.