HDD light stays on with combo CDRW drive

[bwbeye]

I'm stumped!, I've tried 2 different combo drives (MaDdog & LiteOn) with the same results. I've got a TDK Velo 48X burner as master on my secondary IDE controller connection and a Pioneer 16X DVD/CD rom reader only drive as the secondary slave on the secondary IDE controller connection. When I changed the Pioneer drive with the combo drive(s) (slaves as well) and rebooted the HDD activity light stays on all the time with the MaDdog drive and I thought it was a problem with the drive so now it's a paper weight since I can't return it any longer. So I get a LiteOn and try it as well with similar yet worse results, the HDD light is still on yet not as bright and does flicker when the HDD is accessed, however the LiteOn drive seemed to screw up my home network and caused a lengthy boot up as well. When I removed it all went back to "normal", anybody have any ideas? BTW, I've got a Compaq 5838 desktop with lots of memory and HDD spaces.

[glc]

Check your jumpering. Compaq probably is all cable select with either 40 or 80 wire cables - unless you are using generic 40 wire cables, then you use master/slave.

[bwbeye]

Jumpering is correct, TDK as master and the combo as slave. Yes, Compaq does have cable select but I manually set the jumpers anyway and I've tried it every which way anyway. Jumpered master/slave, cable select, switched drives to try each as master. Don't know about the "generic" 40 wire cable, I actually posted to this site about 80 vs 40 wire cable thinking that may have caused the problem. Thanks!