I've switched them both from one being slave and the othe master and vice versa. They're both on the same IDE cable and they both show up. The burner did work for about 20 minutes, reading disks that is but when i tried to burn a cd it said something about powerfailure or something like that. But now all that happens is the light on the front of it flashes. Oh also it shows up that i have three cd drives connected when i only have two. I read somewhere that connecting the cd writer as secondary master and the dvd drive as secondary slave worked for someone. But my unenlightend self does not know how to change from primary to secondary. Is it a different IDE cable or something? Not overly important its just a pain when my dvd drive wont recognize burnt cds and with all the media i have burned from my other computer that died it would be nice to be able to access it again. Thank you to anyone with anykind of information that will make me understand these evil evil boxes

Primary is IDE channel 1, which probably has the hard drive connected. Secondary is IDE 2, normally used for CD drives. It doesn't usually matter what is connected to which channel. The correlation between jumper settings and cable position is critical. Set the jumper on the rear of each drive to CS (cable select). That way it won't matter which positon they're in on the IDE cable. Put the CD-RW on the end connector (master) and the DVD on the center connector (slave). If that still isn't right, set the jumpers to match the cable position (master or slave). Let us know what happens. Cheers.