Hello. I recently picked up an old 4x Creative labs CD drive, model CR-563-B BUS drive, for my old DOS machine. The CD-rom seems to work fine, it powers up and I can eject the tray. The problem comes when I try to hook up the IDE cable to the hard drive controller. When the CD-rom is hooked up, the computer won't recognize the hard drive. I've tried using the CD as master on IDE 1 and I've also tried making it a slave with the hard drive on IDE 0. I've also tried it in another DOS machine with the same results. As far as I can tell, the jumpers are set properly. Is there something I'm missing? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Jeremy

I believe that CD-Rom was the proprietary type. The kind that used to hook up to the special connections on sound cards or cd-rom controller cards. From the Creative site: Double (2X) Speed CR-563 E2550UA E2800UA CDU-33A CDR-210 CD-200 CD-220E The 1X and 2X internal CD-ROM drives requires a Creative/Panasonic or Sony proprietary CD-ROM drive interface. The interface can be found in Sound Blaster Pro and some model of the Sound Blaster 16, for example, SB16 MCD cards or CD-ROM drive interface cards.

Thanks for your help. That makes sense. Would this be the reason that there is no reference to master or slave on the back of the unit? Instead it has jumpers listed one through 4. I had assumed 0 was master and 1 was slave 1. (Not Boba Fetts ship) :)

Yes, thats why. Those cd-roms hooked up to soundblasters of the day and other cards. The old Reveal sound card I have lying about has an hookup for 2 different kinds of CD-roms. The old Packard bell Sound 1 card (its somewhere around here, I haven't come across it lately...) has a hookup for a certain cdrom, also. Creative has limited info but check it here: http://www.americas.creative.com/support/specs/general.asp?Centric=41&sub=150

Ok i try to open a cd-rom and it says that the drive is not accessible.It also says the drive is not ready. I im running WIn 98 can u please help me

This is making me go crazy! My Cd-Rom isn't recognizing the cd and I looked and its hooked up right but I think I need to set something up, maybe on the control panel or something. It just won't know when theres a cd in the tray. Thanks