I am running Win ME with 512mb ram, 1.4gb AMD Athlon processor, 40gb hard drive and a via KT133a agp GA-7ZXE motherboard. I have the usual floppy drive (A) together with a cd rom (drive D), cd writer (drive E) and a smartcard (usb)reader (drive F). Frequently, after start up the cd writer is not displayed in 'My computer'. When checking device manager a yellow exclamation mark is displayed next to 'secondary IDE controller(duel fifo)'. If I select 'properties' I get the message that the device is either not present or not working correctly. If I select 'properies' and 'reinstall driver' I get a report that the best driver is already installed. After a reboot the cd writer is displayed in 'My computer'. However it is often the case that on a subsequent restart that the writer drive is missing again. I have also installed the latest Via 4in1 service pack driver. How can I stop this frustrating error occuring?

Try putting the cdrom and the cdrw on the same cable making one slave and one master. Make sure the jumperson the back of the cd drives are set accordingly. The floppy disc drive is only meant to run by itself on the motherboard which is why it has its own connection on the motherboard. So take the cdrw off of the same cable as the floppy and put it in with the cdrom. This should solve your problems.

you can't have a CD drive on a floppy controller, they can only recognize and use floppy drives, they don't even use the same cable as IDE (hard drive / CD drive). Therefore I suggest you mistyped / interpreted the setup. I don't even think he is giving the configuration of the controllers.