I have an old 486 with no cd rom. I carelessly added a 2x cdrom to the same controller card that my floppy drive and hard drive were plugged in to.(my controller card has 3 separate plug ins available) I say "carelessly added" because I neglected to change the channel setting on the back of my 2x cdrom to something other than #1. After I rebooted nothing appeared on the monitor. Nothing. I proceeded to detach the cdrom that I added to make things as they were. When I restarted again an error message appeared ie. "hdd controller failure" I eventually purchased a new controller and now it works again but I am afraid to try and put this 2x cdrom in again for fear of wrecking another controller card. Can anyone tell me the correct way to implant a 2x cdrom in my computer. And can anyone tell me if my hdd controller card is indeed "fried" or merely in need of some attention. I would appreciate some advice.

I tell you from vag memmory. Is there another slot be side the card. Get another card and plut it in be side the controller you are useing.You are trying to run to much off the one card and it is just going around in a loop trying to detect all and over loading . I hope that I'm telling you right.

You could plug the cdrom into the last connector coming from your harddrive on the ribbon. Make sure the jumper setting on the cdrom is at slave. Make sure your harddrive is connected first on the ribbon.

some of the old 2x cd rom drives had a dedicated board. that means it would only work with the board it came with. You should look up the name of the cd on the net and see if you can find the company and the make and model. The can tell you all you need to know to get it going. 2x speeds and not only slow but there are disks it can not read. so even if you get it going you may still have a hard time geting it to read some disk. owen Prince

Hi, I think Owen Prince is absolutely right. This marking #1 on your CDROM mean it has not IDE but may be Panasonic or some else interface. You can't connect such CDROM to the same connector with hard drive. You need special interface card for such CDROM as Owen Prince suggested or some older sound cards may have special connector for it. Good luck, Igor M