I have a Dell computer and the Samsung drive is set to slave. When the computer starts up from the power off position I get an error message saying that it doesn't detect the drive. I have to enter Bios and act like I change something so when I exit I can save the changes and then when the computer resets the Samsung drive is detected. Other than this problem it works fine. I even reversed the drives and set the DVD-RW as master and the other as slave and it gave me the same porblem except this time on the CD-ROM. Before this I had a regular CD-RW as slave and everything worked fine. Ant help or ideas is appreciated.

So your HD is on the primary controller and you have a DVD and CDROM on the secondary? Or how are all the devices connected? Your bios should see them but generally it doesn't absolutely have to since it's the windows drivers that actually detect them. You might try setting their cmos/bios IDs to AUTO or even NONE and see what that does.

Try putting your cdrom drive on the first channel and the DVD-RW drive on the second channel. If you already have two driver on the first channel, move the slave to the second channel. Windows 'sometimes' has problems with two optical drives on the same cable.

I tried setting the BIOS settings to none and it doesn't work. The default setting is AUTO and this is when the trouble occurs. The optical drives are on IDE2 and I have 2 hard drives on IDE1. Thanks for your help.

You'd need to keep the cmos setting on the HDs at AUTO but the cdrom devices should be OK as NONE. Since it sometimes sees the drive I assume the jumpers and cabling are correct and tight. But you might want to check for sure. Other than that, maybe the cdroms just aren't compatible on the same cable. You might temporarily change the configuration to having the HDs as master on both channels and both cdrom devices as slave.