Found this forum today and decided to see if anyone can shed some light on this problem: Only used one ide channel at first because had SCSI cd. Got Creative Dxr2 ATAPI dvd and found out 2nd ide channel would not work. No matter what I put in - hard drive, cd, dvd, the initial BIOS splash screen shows nothing there. Type of cable (regular ide, or those for ata66 and up) doesn't matter. I even try setting hard drive manually in BIOS and it still refuses to recognize it. I now have latest Biostar BIOS (without the flash screen)and still no joy. So now I have my dvd as slave on channel 1 with Highpoint ata133 SB in one of my slots to run my other harddrive. Both hd are IBM - boot is ata66 & the other is ata33. Channel 1 works fine -recognizes and auto-detects anything I put in as master, slave, etc. Any ideas on what the problem is?

I'm not real sure I follow you on your problem here. I think you are saying that you have your SCSI CDROM and your ATAPI DVDROM on the same cable. And that cable is plugged into IDE2 on your motherboard. If you look at your motherboard where the cable connects to the motherboard it should be printed on there. It should say IDE2. IDE1 is primarily used for your HDDS and IDE2 is for your CDROMS or other drives like that. You cannot use an ATAPI and SCSI drive on the same cable. They have to be on seperate IDE's and you have to set your BIOS up so that it knows what's where. Try clearing your CMOS and with only the DVD connected to the cable that is connected to IDE2 all by itself and the HDD's connected to IDE1 on the same cable and it should work find. Go into setup and load optimized defaults. And then go and buy you an ATAPI CDRW or CDROM to go on the same cable as your DVD ROM. Another option is to buy a PCI IDE controller card and connect either your SCSI or you ATAPI ROM drive to it. But for about the same amount of money you can buy a decent CDRW with CD burning software included. Just make sure that it is an ATAPI CDRW so it will be compatible with your DVD ROM and can share the same cable.

Thanks, Dave - I've tried all that before and no go. I only mentioned my SCSI cd because with that I never used the 2nd ide until I got the ATAPI dvd. My SCSI cd has always been connected to a PCI adapter. Nothing works in the 2nd ide channel - ata33 HD, ATAPI cd, dvd, whatever. I even tried several different ide cables.The only thing I never tried was one of the older-type hard drives, because this BIOS looks like it only understands LBA. ( also I guess the only other thing I never tried was disabling the 1st ide channel in BIOS and seeing if it would then "see" the 2nd channel... )

on an old pc I bought the 2nd ide channel was disabled in the bios, check and verify that this is not the case, sounds like it. Al

The 2nd ide channel is only disabled in the BIOS when I am NOT trying to get it to work. By now I have pretty much given up on it and have been using a Highpoint ata133 SB in a PCI slot for my other hard drive. With the 2nd ide channel disabled, IRQ 15 gets used by the BIOS for a PNP device. Whenever I try to get the 2nd ide channel working IRQ 15 gets assigned to the 2nd ide channel like it is supposed to. I guess I just got a bad board - too bad i never tried to use the 2nd ide until after my warranty ran out...