I'm not a very knowledgeable person on this, so I hope someone can help.

My brother bought a used computer. It has the specs I said above, and a 10 gig hard drive and a basic CD-Drive.

Now he has a broken laptop. It has a 40 gig hard drive. So I bought an adaptor/converter and put the laptop hard drive in the tower.

This is the thing that is driving me crazy.

I can have only two things hooked up, plus the Disk-Drive.

I can have 1 hard drive, and a CD Drive. Or 2 Hard Drives and No CD Drive.

I have a cable that goes from the motherboard, and has two slots. So I thought One slot can go to a hard drive, and the other to the other hard drive, or cd drive.

But whenever I hook up all 3, and turn on the computer, it doesn't recoginize all 3. Just 2 of them.

I have no idea, but my only guess would be that something is wrong with the motherboard, and it won't allow 3 things on there.

I actually have another friend. He wanted to have 2 Hard Drives and keep his CD Drive as well. And I easily added a second Hard Drive, by adding both Hard Drives on the same cable.

Why isn't it working this time. Is something wrong with the motherboard.

First guess from me would be a setup issue in the BIOS, also check everthing for master and slave settings........HTH

Keep the old stuff running

I'm not familiar with laptop HDDs, but on a desktop system, there are usually 2 IDE channels...a primary & a 2ndary. Each channel can have 2 devices...a master & a slave. On the back of each IDE device, there is a small jumper cap that must be moved to designate the drive as either master or slave.

Keep the desktop HDD set as the master on the primary channel/cable with no other devices attached. Setup the laptop HDD as the master & the CD-ROM as the slave on the 2ndary channel/cable.

ASUS A7N8X-X
Athlon XP 1800+
8.5 x 200MHz
1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7
Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro SP2

The really important thing to note is that each drive on a cable must be plugged different. You cannot have two masters or two slaves.

Thanks so much!
I was hoping it was something obvious I didn't know about. I just moved this pin over on the CD Drive, and it picked up both Hard Drives and the CD Drive. Thanks Jam.