SATA DVD Drive Disabled; Cannot Enable

[jillsy]

I just finished a new build yesterday for my husband and everything was peachy until a little while ago. I have an IDE DVD-ROM/CD Burner, 1 SATA hard drive, and 1 SATA DVD burner. I have a Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3P board which has 6 SATA connectors on the Intel ICH9R Southbridge and 2 Gigabyte SATA2 connectors. I have all SATA connectors set to AHCI mode.

The build specs are:
Thermaltake M9 Case
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3P Mobo
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 CPU
PC Power & Cooling S610EPS
Kingston KHX8500D2K2/2GN (2 x 1GB) Memory
BFG Tech BFGE86512GTOC2FE GeForce 8600GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
LITE-ON Combo Black IDE Model DH-52C2P-08 (DVD-ROM/CD Burner)
LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model LH-20A1L-06
Rosewill RCR-FD200 All-in-one USB 2.0 Black 3.5" Card Reader with 1.44MB Floppy Drive
Windows XP Pro 32-Bit

I originally connected my HD to the ICH9R SATA 0 and the SATA DVD burner to ICH9R SATA 1. Everything was working fine last night and this morning. Both optical drives were working normally and the card reader was connected and working. The IDE optical drive was assigned D, the SATA optical drive E, and the card reader slots F and G.

However, later I noticed that the SATA DVD burner had been disabled and I could not enable it in Device Manager. I'm pretty sure this happened when I connected a WD MyBook USB hard drive to one of the rear USB connectors. It was assigned E, the SATA DVD drive was gone, and when I went to Device Manager, the SATA DVD drive was disabled.

Since then I have tried various things. I removed the USB hard drive and rebooted. The SATA DVD drive is detected by the ICH9R BIOS during boot-up, but is still disabled in Windows. I tried connecting to a different Southbridge connector, but it's still disabled.

I also tried connecting the drive to the Gigabyte SATA2 connectors. It is detected in the Gigabyte BIOS and in Windows, but it causes Windows to take a long time to load and makes the system unstable. For instance, when I open My Computer, the mouse pointer becomes jumpy as if the system is really bogged down.

I also tried disconnecting the card reader (the USB portion) along with the above options, but still nothing. The drive is disabled if connected to the Southbridge connectors, and causes a major bog down if connected to the Gigabyte SATA2 connectors.

I have this same optical drive set-up (1 IDE, 1 SATA on same SATA connectors with my SATA hard drives in AHCI mode) on my system and it works fine in both XP and VISTA (I have a dual-boot system). However, I don't have any USB hard drives connected to my PC.

The drive in question on my husband's system has power and responds when a CD is inserted, so I don't think it's the drive itself.

In a web search, I found an article that stated Vista had a problem with SATA optical drives disappearing after switching SATA from IDE to AHCI in the BIOS, but this is XP.

Anyway, I'm still trying different things, but if anyone has any ideas I'd be glad to hear them. I just knew this build was going to smoothly .

Thanks,
Jill

[shadowpr]

Check to see if the drive is seen in disk management. You might have to reassign it a drive letter.

[jillsy]

I think I solved the problem. I don't think it made any difference, but I connected the DVD drive to SATA 5 on the Southbridge. I rebooted and it was still disabled. I went to Device Manager and uninstalled it. Then I rebooted and Windows did the Found New Hardware thing and it reappeared in My Computer.

I then shut down and reconnected the card reader. I rebooted and those slots showed up in My Computer. Then while in Windows I connected MyBook and it added that, too. I've restarted a couple of times now and everything seems to be fine. I even installed a couple of programs with the SATA DVD drive.

I think I originally connected the MyBook while the PC was off. It must not have liked that, but connecting it with Windows running was apparently OK.

I hope this info helps someone else who may have a similar problem.

[jillsy]

Thanks, shadowpr. You must have posted while I was writing my reply. Thank you for reading my long post and giving your advice.