Secondary IDE Channel

[Joegii]

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?

 

[wedor]

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

 

[Joegii]

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

 

[brianF]

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.

 

[Monk_]

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.

 

[Joegii]

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!!!!

 

[brianF]

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

 

[Shadow2531]

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