Hey guys, here's the deal. I replaced my stock Dell Power Supply (230W) to a 400W PSU I bouhgt on Ebay. I bought it so it could run my new Geforce gfx card. After plugging in all of the power supply cords, everything worked fine.. EXCEPT my optical drive. I figured it was perhaps a fried IDE cable or my also stock CD drive had passed away. I meant to get a new drive anyways, so I bought a Gearhead 20X DVD-drive. Not the best, but still pretty good. I just plugged it in and it didnt work. Then I tried changing the jumper from Master to Cable Select and that also didn't work. The only thing I haven't tried tried is replacing the IDE cable. This is easy, but am I missing anything else? Thanks so much fopr the help guys! PS: both drives opened, but they don't read disks and don't show up in my computer. Again thanks!
If you've got a spare IDE port just run the opticle drive only on that port you won't have to set it to master or slave just completely remove the jumper from the drive. btw is it also a 80pin ide cable? not the crap old 40 pin cable. you can check this by looking at the amount of stripes on the cable. some later udma devices don't work on 40 pin cables. BTW: does it detect the drive in the bios? and also if it doesn't work after replacing ide cable go for a firmware update.
When I looked in the BIOS, it said <not present> so now I'm REALLY running out if ideas? I also tried a brand new, for sure compatible, IDE cable I bought earlier and it also didn't work. Is there anything I missed since the tech support for Gearhead won't be available till Monday?
try a reset cmos, bios could be corrupt. if no luck after the reset cmos send the drive back to where you bought it from.
I don't think it's the drives fault. The original one didn't work, and I just bought this one less than two days ago brand new. It's not a hugely well known brand though. I had never even heard of Gear Head befor all of this
I;'ve had a brand new drive, it installed windows and then didn't work again. so this type of stuff does happen. if you've ruled out the data cable, and also done a reset cmos and also tried a different ide port. then it must be the drive it self that is the problem. btw: I take it you have IDE hard drive and that works perfectly? if so you can also rule out your ide controller being faulty. last thing you could try is a bios update.
