Same Computer, Different Problem

[yellohut]

I'm working on my friend's computer, a gateway with windows ME.
She's had a lot of problems, so I convinced her that she'd she the greatest benefits from a nuke and pave.
So that's what I'm in the process of doing, except nothing is easy on this machine.
for whatever reason, when both her cd drives are hooked up, windows won't recognize eitherof them. they're detected in bios and they both work when I boot with a boot disk, but in windows, nothing.
when I unplug the power from the slave (cd burner) than the other works.. but I can't get the cd-r to work at all (either independantly or as a pair)

also, whenever I'm installing stuff it freezes... it will look like the installation is continuin, the hourglass will spin, and the animations animate, but it'll get stuck at whatever% and stay there.

I'm gona try some other things, but I wanted to know waht you guys thought.

P.S. telling me to scrap ME and just install XP won't help me.. it's not an option in this case.

TIA - yello

[GaryRouth]

Seems like to save your sanity, you could test each of the two drives separately in an extra "test" machine, if you've got one. At least then you'll know it's not just a bad drive.

The jumpers and cabling might've been off a bit, too: you can recheck that both IDE controllers are set to "Auto" in the Bios, that the cabling for the opticals is 40wire (especially if they're older drives), and that the jumpering is Master/Slave ... maybe one of the jumpers came off in all the swapping. [you could also try a couple of different cables, if you have some]

An installation freezing isn't going to be helped by a bad cd-drive, but that could be a bunch of other things as well (memory, motherboard, power-supply, heat, etc). Seems like you could start the ball rolling by testing those cd-drives somewhere - since they're your first suspects.

You should be getting some overtime treats for all the work you've done on that one. Sounds like a free dinner/movie coming up to me
. . . Gary

[Stephen092578]

Try seperating the drives. Put your Burner on the secondary channel as Master and put the CDR on the primary channel as slave to the hard drive. Your ROMS may not like each other (boy that is technical Older ROMS had a real conflict issue when they were paired on the same channel.

[yellohut]

i tried hooking it up any way i could think of... i even hooked the cd-rw to my computer and it didn't work. i just told her that it was dead and she bought a new one.
everything's working great now.
thanks for your help!