I figured this would be an appropriate forum for such a specific question, especially since there are some very knowledgeable people here. My question is related to the BIOS. I was reserving various IRQ's and eventually reserved all of the ones in the list, including the IRQ's assigned to serial port A and the parallel port. After that, I've been experiencing a very peculiar and irritating problem. If I plug my ide hard disk into one of the two available ide slots (I will refer to this as the primary slot), the disk works fine. On the other hand, if I plug it into the other slot, it doesn't do squat. Now, obviously the reasonable conclusion to all of this is that the slot has burned out, and although this really seems to be the case, it is not. The reason I know the slot is not burned out is because I was able to write to a CD in Windows. By the way, the only way I was able to get the system to recognize the dvd drive (and it may not be at all relevant) was to, after Windows boot stalled (for whatever reason?)... power down the system, boot into Windows again (choose Last Known Good Configuration) and wait for the boot procedure to finish. Also, when I plug the hard drive into the primary slot and the optical drive into the secondary one, the hard disk works while the dvd drive doesn't, and vice versa. I've tried setting all masters and slaves to the appropriate device (auto, cd-rom) and unplugging one device while keeping the other plugged in, interchanging them, etc etc ad infinitum. This really has me stuck in a bind and I have no clue how to fix it or even what is wrong. Any ideas are much appreciated. Thanks

Wht are you playing withe the IRQ settings? If you only have two IDE devices, the HDD should be the Primary Master & the DVD drive should be the 2ndary Master. Some HDD have two separate Master setting choices, either Master (single) or Master (with Slave)...make sure your's is set correctly. Don't use Cable Select.

You do not need to reserve IRQ's, that went out of date with the passing of ISA Cards. Restore your BIOS to Default and make sure as JAM said that the jumpers are corect and that you are using the middle of IDE cable for Slave and the end for Master

Hi, You did check the BIOS SETUP? Some don't default to AUTO. Luck Jim

This has been fixed. I flashed the bios and set jumpers on both drives to master. I was playing around with the irq's in an attempt to get various linux live cd's to work.