I have a friend who told me of his cd burner which stopped working. I took a working cd drive out of one of his other computers and put it into the one that stoped working. When i put it into that one, the computer would no longer boot. It would only boot when the broken was in it or when there was no cd drive in it. The computer is a compaq pesario i think. I am not sure if i should spend the money and get a new drive because then there is the risk of it not booting with that drive.

Did you reset the jumper on the back of the drive? There are 3 settings...master (MA), slave (SL), cable select (CS). In my opinion, cable select should NEVER be used, but for some reason, OEMs like it. Also, it's best not to pair up two optical drives or two HDDs on the same cable. One again, I'll repeat the best IDE configuration: primary master = HDD w/OS primary slave = optical reader 2ndary master = optical writer 2ndary master = 2nd HDD If you only have one optical device, it should be the 2ndary master & the HDD w/OS should be alone on the primary channel. Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @ 8.5 x 200MHz 1280MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro

The setup was this... pri master - hard drive pri slave - nothing sec master - cd drive sec slave - nothing

With just two drives, that's how it should be. Did you check that the jumpers were set correctly? Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @ 8.5 x 200MHz 1280MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro

sure did, this was really stumping me

Did you try swapping out the ide cable?

I would first remove the old cd r/w and all reference to it (drivers etc) from the o/s, using add/remove hw on the control panel. Then I would install the newer cdrom and the os should recognise and install the correct driver(s). Previous responses are valid, particular strap settings. Good Luck - Keep us posted.