Hi Guys, I've got three questions which I think someone will be able to answer dead easy - I'm just not sure myself. I have a dvdrom drive installed in my DIY system but not connected. The HD is on IDE primary master and my cdrw is on secondary master. My sound card is a soundblaster live 5.1. The questions please are - 1. Would the the dvdrom be better as a slave on the primary or secondry ide? Or making it the master on the secondry and making the cdrw a slave on the primary? 2. On my sound card there are 4 input slots - TAD CD-IN AUX-IN CD-SPDIF. Currently my cdrw is connected to CD-IN. Should I connect the dvdrom to the AUX-IN and would that differ depending on whereabouts on the ide it was placed? 3. I am looking to purchase a dvdrw soon to replace the dvdrom. Would that then make a difference to whereabouts on the ide and sound card connections the dvdrw was placed? Thanks in advance for any info - much appreciated. JerryH

It should be ok on the secondary channel as a slave. As far as the audio cable goes, you don't need it. Go into device manager and look in the CD/DVD-ROM devices for you DVD drive. Double click on the drive and click on the Properties tab. Put a checkmark next to "Enable digital audio for this device".

Thanks for that Kurt - never had a reply so quick before. The comment ref the audio - should I have that done for my cdrw as well??

Yup, you can do that for the CD drive as well. "should I have that done for my cdrw as well??" You can if you want but it's not nessessary, It's done for convenience since some sound cards only had one connector for external audio.

Hi Jerry Well the word on the street is never to put 2 optical drives on 1 cable. Therefore I recommend that you attach the dvd as Primary Slave, keep the cdrw as secondary master. Wolfey On a hot summers night would you offer your throat to the Wolf with the Red Roses?

As wolfeymole said, put the DVD on the Pri as slave. The main reason is that any writes to the burner, either from a CD in the slave or from the hard drive are not copying using the same channel for the source and destination. The best throughput is what he suggested. Good luck Richard