Hi Everyone, My continuing saga of reviving an old ibm for a friend. I have added a 1.2 gig, 80mg and a cd/rw to this machine. What is interesting, I loaded the w95 and w98 upgrade using the cd/rw, now the computer does not see the cd/rw and the 80mg hd added to the hardware. I set the bios on auto, initially, the device manager had listed the cdrom and now that category has disappeared. What can I do so the machine can recognize the cd/rw and the newly installed 80mg hd. thanking you for your past help and hoping you can further aid in bringing this old computer back to life, charlie

In most lder machines you have to manualy detect all drives.Even if it has the option of auto detect you might still find place in the bios where you can guide the detection.Some times it tae a few moments.If this is not the case the make sure your have your master/slave oriantation correct.If that dosnt help try this:Awhile back I had a pc that refused to detect the hard drive if i had a cd drive in stalled also.With both in it wouldnt detect either no matter what i did.Finnaly someone suggested setting the hard drive to master on ide1 and the cd drive to slave on ide2.And unusual combo but it worked.This probly means the ide controller is F.U.B.A.R. but it has been working fine for a couple of mounths. good luck and happy hacking

Hi Wolfe, I'll start this for the second time, i was writing all the had happened as I was getting the machine to function, when the whole paragraph was erased. After I started with the 31/2 diskette, cd/rw and the 1/2 gig hd. The bios is old and does not list cdrom's, I used the hd listing for the cd/rw and the machine recognized the cdrom. I loaded the w95 and then the w98 upgrade using the cd/rw, the device manager showed a cdrom folder, I loaded a 1.2g hd as master, moved the 1/2 g hd to slave on the main cable, with the cd/rw as master on the secondary cable. I don't know what happened, now the device manager has deleted the cdrom entry, bios does not see the cd/rw and am trying to get the machine to see the cdrom again. I also have an 80mb hd which I connected to the slave position of the secondary cable; bios and dm does not see this hd either. The bios is set on auto for both pieces of hardware. The bios is ami, the machine works with this old bios, I was curious about possibly updating the bios, I download the ami software to id the motherboard, but the program drew a blank, saying the maker was unknown. I don't believe its necessary to update the bios since it recognized and was functioning with the bios that came with the machine. If you give me some more input I would appreciate your help, thanks, charlie

My first impression from the info or your responce is that your IBM can only support 2 ide devices at once.I dont know the exact model but I have run across a few pc's that simply dont support 4 ide.Wich is somthing we take for granted today.Like i seid thats just a quike guess.More info on the exact model # and moutherboard info could help me.

Hi Wolfe, Just wanted to tell you; you were right on target, the main cable looks like it will only support the main hd. Now it sees the cd/rw, taking a chance, I put the 1/2g hd on the secondary cable, it now see it. thank you for the information about old computers. This is the computer that has been given a new life, thank you again, charlie