Using old CD roms

[Panama Red]

Is there any way to use older CD rom drives with the newer ATX motherboards? I have a few salvaged from 486 AT machines with 1994 manufacturing dates that are not recognized by newer ATX machines. I realize CD roms are relatively inexpensive, I just dislike throwing working hardware in the trash.

[fredwest]

Hi Panama,
Well, if the BIOS doesn't see the drives in question then you've hit a brick wall.....they won't work in that system.

Are they jumpered correctly on the given IDE channel? If so then, for example, does a Windows 98 boot disk see them and can you then access them?

If none of the above work then IMO it's the bin!

[homer15]

i would say as long as they're ide drives, i don't think there'd be a problem.

optical drives don't show up in my bios, just an fyi.

[fredwest]

Hi homer15,
In most propriety systems they will show when the device type for the given channel on which the drive is connected is set to 'auto' or the equivalent and a reboot is then performed.

With that done in the BIOS, they should show as a device thats been found on boot just after the POST beep when the RAM etc is being calculated/checked.

This is what I've found in my experience anyway. But it's by no means set in concrete :)

If this doesn't yield a detected drive then IMO the drive is either faulty or something else entirely.....like the mobo won't support it.

It seems fairly straight forward to me.....
....and I personally wouldn't waste any more time on it :cool:

[Panama Red]

Thanx guys. Neither a 98se system nor XP will recognize these old timers, so looks like time to give em a decent burial!

[glc]

They may not be IDE drives - real old 1x and 2x CD drives back then used proprietary MKE, Mitsumi, or Sony interfaces, which require a controller card or a sound card with the correct interface. If the drive does not have a set of MA, SL, and CS jumpers and has no jumpers or a set that look like SCSI ID's, that's what you have. It's easy to get fooled, because 2 of those 3 interfaces do use 40 pin ribbon cables.