My HP CD Writer Plus is no longer recognized. I disconnected the cable to try out a hard drive that was not working. Now the system will not recognize the CD RW. The bios says there is no device installed on the second IDE and the device is not listed in the device manager or recognized by the add hardware wizard.

Try the writer on the Primary IDE channel. It is possible that the Secondary channel is not working. Is the writer jumpered correctly? Is the Second IDE channel enaabled in the BIOS? Was it working before trying the defective HD?

Hi

Possible probles:
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may be IDE does not work or ribon cable does not work properly.
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Troubleshooting
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-try to change put it in primary and check if it working.

Malinda Ramadhani
Satcom Network Africa Ltd,
Technical support

The CD was working before I tried to connect the hard drive. The BIOS does not show anything installed on the secondary IDE channel and I cannot find any place to tell it to install a CD. I tried hooking the CD up to the primary cable and the BIOS did recognize it but it would not boot from the CD.

If the Secondary channel enabled then you may have fried it when connecting a bad Harddrive. Look in Device Manager to see if both channels are identified and are working properly. Look under hard disk controllers.