I can not for the life of me get my 2 hardrives, a cd rom, to boot up in it's proper order...at ALL for that matter if I hook them all up. Most importantly...no matter what I try I can't get the CDROM, or the 2nd hard drive, to work on the secondary channel. At present I can make both drives (2 HD's or a HD and CDROM combo) work on the primary channel, but if I add a drive to the secondary channel (as either Slave OR Master), it freezes during Posting (at the Aptiva screen). - Tried totally switching channels... exactly the same problem. - Tried every Master/Slave combo that I can think of. Any ideas...??? It's an IBM Aptiva (model 2170-24U), with an AMD K6-2 450, and I'm running Windows ME. It used to work fine until my fan died and I had to unplug the cables to be able to replace it (it's in a "Mini-Tower"). ANY help would be greatly appreciated! :)

Your secondary cable is plugged into the MB backwards.

Thanks A1, but I have the "good" cables... the ones that you can't connect the wrong way... one of the holes is blanked out and you can't connect it in the wrong orientation. Anyone else...??? :) Karen

Are you letting it auto detect or are you pressing F3 in the cmos? Let it auto detect. Did you try to remove the pins (master/slave) when you put the 2nd HD in the secondary channel? I have Win ME and had a similiar to yours... it turned out one of the drives was defective but the two solutions above it detected the drive when I tried it. Hope it helps.

Since you can double up on one cable & can't do squat on the other, my guess would be a bad cable. Maybe you somehow damaged it when you unplugged? Did you try flip-flopping them from Primary to Secondary & then connect your devices?