This is a weird one... I have a Toshiba SD-M1402 DVD-ROM drive, which works perfectly under Win98SE and is, of course, properly detected by BIOS at bootup so this can't be a connection problem. Now, when I decided to make a dual install with Windows 2000 Professional, installing it to a separate NTFS partition, no DVD drive. Symptoms: Whenever I boot Win2k, there is a precisely 36 seconds long do-nothing delay at the logo screen. When it finally finishes booting, I check the Event Manager and find six error messages, ATAPI being the source. The error message in each one is as follows: The device, \Device\ide\ideport1, did not respond within the timeout period. It seems that the bootup delay is due to the six 6-second long tries the system makes to somehow try and make contact with the drive. The DVD-ROM is set up as master on my Secondary IDE channel. Again, it works great in every other environment I've tried, Linux included. Both the Microsoft Hardware Compatibility List and Toshiba certify the DVD-ROM as Win2k compatible without separate drivers and hence, none are available. My mobo is an Asus A7V with a 650 MHz AMD Duron, 128 megs, two hard drives in the Primary IDE channel. To make things even more bizarre: the first two OS installation attempts were made from my HD (I copied the CD there to speed up the process), but the third time I tried to install it from the CD itself, that was in the DVD-ROM drive; worked perfectly until the very last parts of the install, when it suddenly asked me for a file on the CD, unable to find the drive anymore. This is amazing. Anyone have a clue what's going on?

Hi, I just wanted to say that I had exactly the same problems with my ASUS A7V-motherboards. It seems like it's the motherboard BIOS or something. I solved the problem when placing the CD-ROM on the UATA100-interface. Everything works just fine, then. Try that, and wait for ASUS to make a BIOS upgrade...