I recently formatted my HD and put in a CD rom drive, when the system boot up it shows a conflict of i/o ports 2F8, I was told that by setting the COM2 to 3E8 it might correct this problem. Now the problem is the system does not recognise my CD drive. I have checked that my HD is master & the CD drive is slave. System boot up showing primary master present but no primary slave. Any forthcoming help or ideas on this problem will be much appreciated. Thnxs.

Not all cdrom drives are recognized by the Bios. If it's a `real' old drive it might need the drivers loaded in Dos. Also, check this out: http://www.mesich.com/cdrommissing.html

The com port conflict may have been due to a modem occupying the same address as an on-board com port. It's common to disable a com port in cmos to allow a modem to use that setting. I'm thinking maybe your cmos got reset or someone changed the settings. Given that possibility, you should check the other settings. Is the cdrom a slave on the primary or is it on the secondary cable? If it's on the secondary, make sure the secondary IDE controllers are enabled in cmos.

if ur computers old (like mine) u can just load the drivers in a windows 95/98(dunno about 2000) environment, by going through the install new hardware stuff thats in ur control panel!