Trying to get two optical drives to work on Asus P5Q Pro mobo

Hi

I have two IDE based optical drives - 1 CDROM & 1 DVDROM. After getting a new mobo (ASUS P5Q Pro), & can only seem to get 1 device working at a time.

When I have both attached to the mobo (via the same IDE cable), the system stalls before Windows even begins to load. As soon as I unplug one of the divices the the system boots up as normal.

Got any ideas?

Thanks

 

The IDE system follows the following rules.

Each channel (cable) can have one or two devices connected.
Any device can be set by jumper to be either master or slave.
Each channel must have one master connected: this is normally the end of the cable.
The second device on that channel must be set to slave: this is normally in the middle of the cable.
Only one device at time can use the interface so copying from one drive to another on the same cable is very slow.
Optical drives are best distributed between the 2 ide channels most pcs possess for this reason.

 

studiot is exactly correct. On the back of the drives, to the left of the IDE connector, you'll see a small block of 6 pins. Master is the top and bottom pin on the right end of the 6 pin jumper block; slave is the middle set of pins; cable select is the top and bottom pins on the left end of the 6 pin jumper block. Ideally, the jumpers should be set as studiot described. However, you can also set both drives to cable select and the PC will automatically assign the drive at the end of the cable as Master, and the drive on the middle of the cable would be the Slave.

 

Thanks all, this problem has now been resolved - I totally forgot about the jumpers. :-o

The new ASUS mobos are coming out with heavy support for SATA drives & only offer a single connection for IDE cables. My previous Asus mobo had two IDE cables - hence me not having this issue before.

System related question:

Does anyone know of an easy why in which to reassign Drives letters (i.e. C, D, E, etc) for HDD's?

As I've had a bit of difficulty in getting my PC to run, I've had to do a bit of tweaking, this has resulted in my optical drives apearing in the middle of my HDD's (in Windows Explorer) & I'd like to know if there is a way in which I can remap the HDD's so that they flow in a more logical order (without having to reinstall everything again).​

 

What I did was to disconnect all hard drives except for the boot drive and the letter assignment went perfectly. However, I can't comment on partitioned drive letter assignments as I haven't tried that yet. I just added a 500GB and everything's all over the place ATM. Hasn't bothered my Vista install yet.

 

You can play with your drive letters by opening the Disk Management Console

Type

diskmgmt.msc

into the run box

Right click on a drive or partition and choose change letter from the context menu.

 

After running the Disk Management Console as suggested, Windows now seems to not like what I have done.

After the machine has been running for about 30min, I get a message popping up in my taskbar. An orange triangle pops up with a exclamation mark followed by a message saying something along the lines of:

Does anywone know why Windows would display this message after running the Disk Management Console?

After this message is displayed I can't access any of my drives (other than my C drive) - they are not even displayed in Windows Explorer.

My system currently has two physical drives. The C drive is stand alone, while the other pysical drive (1TB) has been partitioned - therefore once the error message is displayed I cannot access the 1TB drive.

I'm wondering if there is some disk management tool somewhere which may be shutting the drive off after a certain time once not in use, but then fails to start the disk when access is required.

When I restart the PC, all drives are once again able to be accessed.

FYI: The 1TB drive is a Western Digitigal Caviar Green.