Hardware Help

[Liesje]

OK, so computer A has good parts, except my fiance wanted to keep the HD and add it to his computer. So I took the HD from computer B (crappy parts) and put it in computer A. Computer A already has a CD-ROM and a CD-RW drive. However, neither of the drives show up in My Computer with the new HD in. When I boot, the first screen shows the HD recognized, but then says NONE for secondary master and secondary slave (I'm assuming that's referring to the optical drives). I go into the BIOS and everything except the HD is set to AUTO. It's all plugged in exactly how it was when HD A was still in computer A. How do I get the new HD to work with these drives? Or what do I change in the BIOS? I can switch them from AUTO to CD-ROM, but that doesn't really help as it's still not seeing the drives. I d/l the firmware and drivers, but those won't install b/c the drives aren't recognized.

If it matters, the drives are Asus CD-S520/A5 and Lite-on-it SOHR-5239S

Grrr, I really suck at hardware stuff! Not my area of expertise

 

[Liesje]

Also, I want to wipe the HD and reinstall XP Pro SP2, but b/c of this issue it won't boot off either optical drive. It's weird b/c the first time I tried, it did boot off my disc, but then the setup thing failed b/c it said a file was corrupt (I get that sometimes b/c I think my discs are cheap). So I inserted a different bootable disc, rebooted, and then it stopped seeing the optical drives.

Oh, and in the BIOS for the Boot order, it has the CD-ROM listed first, but it says NONE and the only other option is DISABLE.

I'm not good w/ BIOS stuff so I'm scared to try and change it...

 

[nbcrusader]

When you swapped the HD, was it the HD with the operating system?

 

[Liesje]

Yup, both HDs have WinXP Pro SP2. In Windows, no optical drives show up and it doesn't even show up in Device Manager as needing drivers, they're just not there at all.

 

[nbcrusader]

I've had a similar experience - swapping a HD and having devices not recognized. It is a quirk with XP.

I actually got it to work by booting with no HD attached, then plugging in the HD just after the system posted (just after BIOS looks to see if there is a HD).

Try booting without the HD attached, so the different copy of XP isn't a factor. Adjust BIOS until you know you will boot first from the CD.

It was a long night trying to figure out that one.

 

[Liesje]

We figured it out. There was confusion over which drives were the masters and slaves. A friend of mine came over and re-adjusted everything and now they're both installed and working. Once we did that, the BIOS allowed me to change the boot order so the CD-Rom is first.

Lucky for my parents! They're getting a "new" computer tomorrow...