Hi I have a packard bell pc with a cd/r drive and a dvd rom drive. The dvd rom drive has never worked and i can't understand why. Everything looks fine in device manager but it doesn't respond when any type of disc is inserted.
The model no. as shown in device manager is: HL-DT-ST DVD ROM GDR8161B if thats any help? Been bugging me for ages and can't sort it out.Please Help!

Could be the way it is jumpered/cabled on the IDE.

Or, it could be abad drive.

Thanks for your reply

So how would i solve that?

a)Take it a part and check the cabling?- would it come up as working properly in device manager if it wasn't cabled correctly?
or
b)buy a new drive?

How is it cabled?

I'd have primary IDE: HDD master and DVD ROM slave. Then secondary IDE: CDRW master.

Why wouldnt you have the CD and DVD on the same IDE cable?

Matt

www.bbcomputing.co.uk

matt@bbcomputing.co.uk

Its having CDRWs/DVDRW with other optical drives that can cause problems. I had my DVDRW as slave with a CDROM as master and it wouldn't get past the POST. I swapped them and problem solved. No one has ever told me why this is the case.

Its not just the way it is wired you need to check its the jumper settings as well.

As an off the shelf machine wouldn't you expect it to be cabled correctly though? Was the DVD added later?

Watch the POST screens at startup to verify that all drives are identified by model. If so, look in device manager to verify three listings for IDE controllers. This will indicate the MBoard chipset drivers are installed. As far as the jumpers are concerned if using CS (cable select), you must use it for both drives on that channel. I personally prefer using MASTER and SLAVE settings. Western digital harddrives have two MASTER settings. Master alone and Master with slave. Some MBoard chipsets don't like two OPTICAL drives on one channel. I would recommend connecting one of the CDroms as the slave on the Primary IDE channel. When using Master and Slave jumpering the position of the drive on the cable has no impact on the MASTER or SLAVE settings. When using CS the drive on the end of the cable will be the Master. The Boot Harddrive MUST be configured as the master.

Avoid putting two optical drives on the same cable. This is known to occasionally cause problems.

"Avoid putting two optical drives on the same cable. This is known to occasionally cause problems"

That's true...I don't know why, but I've encountered it a few times myself. I never put 2 optical drives on the same cable, or 2 HDDs on the same cable...& if I'm installing a burner, I always make it the 2ndary master. Also, I never use cable select. I've never encountered any probs when configuring IDE devices this way

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz
768MB PC3200
Asus A9550 128MB/128-bit
Gamer Edition
WinME/WinXP Pro

Why not remove the CD drive and put the DVD in it's place, jumper it as master and see if it works. Maybe you can eliminate the possiblity of a bad drive this way.
Also you say it never worked, does it do anything? open and close?