CD Drive master / slave problem.

Hello all! I bought a HP computer from a friend that had two CD Drives but the bottom one was empty so I put the top one in the bottom slot and put a burner in the top one and installed the software for it. I took the computer into a shop because I was having problems upgrading it from ME to XP Home.

The computer repairman, who admitted he wasn't very sharp, said the computer thought both drives were slaves and none were masters OR the bottom one was a master and one was a slave.

This is over my head. I can switch out the hardware but how do I fix this so I can burn CDs again? I can use the top one to play CDs but I can't burn anything.

Any suggestions? Thanks!!!

 

On the back of the drive is the jumpers, usually the positions are marked.
What brand & model CD drives do you have?
Remove the drives and Look to see what thay are set for.
Another thing the cable that connects the cd drives to the computer Mother board, the cable that connects does it have two connections for the CD drives? the one at the end of the cable would be for the CD drive that is set to master, the other is for the slave drive.
You can burn CD's, Are you sure you have a CD burner?

Here is example of jumper settings, Although this is for a Seagate HDD your CD drives will be somewhat different:
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/ref/jumper_settings.html
It also shows IDE cable, master?slave position which would be same for your CD drives.
Another Note, you should not connect a CD drive to the same cable as you Hard drive.


Here is two cents more for free,
The best way to upgrade from ME to XP, is to do a fresh install.
I'd would go back to the computer man, sounds like he's a nuckle head!

 

Thanks for your reply. I will pull them out tomorrow and take a close look but for now, the original just reads Compact Disc on the front. That one was the only one that came with the computer and the bottom CD Drive was empty. I took the CD Burner out of our old Dell and put that in the top drive and put the original in the bottom drive slot. We successfully burned CDs with the one that was in the Dell. On the face it reads,
LG Compact Disc Writer High Speed 24x10x40x.
I installed the original installation disc which was 'Easy CD Creator 5 Basic'
When I right click on properties it reads next to Description, "Win95-to-WinNT Migration Dll, Win95 Side"

As I stated earlier, the drive works fine as a normal cd reader but when I asked the computer repairman why it wasn't working he said the computer thinks that drive is a slave when it should think it's a master...or something like that.

I'll pull her out and follow your instructions within the next 12 hrs and see what I have learned.

Thanks again for your response and help! I'll get back to you soon!