Secondary IDE Channel

I recently installed 128 mb RAM in the last open slot. Now I can't see my 2 CD drives. They are both tied to the Secondary IDE. I removed the cover again to make sure the plugs on the IDE cables were in all the way, and they were. When I go to Device Manager, under "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers", it list the Intel Master IDE controller and the Primary IDE Channel. It no longer list the Secondary IDE channel. Any ideas?

 

What Operating sytem are you using? Windows? which version?

 

I'm using Windows XP on a Dell Dimension XPS R450

 

do you see the drives listed on boot, you should see them recognized by bios on boot up.

Try a different cable, they do go bad.

You could also try add remove hardware in control panel to try and reinstall the drives if they are recognized at boot.

 

If you can, boot and go into BIOS. Look for IDE Configuration or something similar and be sure that both Controllers are enabled. I have seen this problem before on a Dell.

 

Thanks for responding. At boot-up, only the keyboard and mouse are recognized now. I went into setup and verified that the IDE Configuration shows that the IDE controller is set to "both". The Primary IDE Master shows my hard drive. The other 3 say "none". I have a ZIP drive on the primary slave cable (not recognized at boot-up but working fine), and CD-ROM and CD-RW drives as the secondary master and slave. Can use any help!!!!

 

can you set the secondarys for auto detect or cdrom.
If that doesn't work I would try another ide cable after insuring that the current cable is fitted tight with the red stripe to pin 1 on the drives, also check the back of the roms, make sure a jumper didn't fall off. One needs to be jumpered master the other slave

 

try uninstalling the 128MB in the last slot and see if everything goes back to normal.