Ping: computer hardware people

[Wolfpack]

I've been upgrading my computer with some new parts as it's now three years old (P4 3.0 GHz), but have run into a problem. In the time since I last got a hard drive, it looks like SATA has become the dominant type of hard drive over IDE, which is what my older drive (160 GB) is. My new drive is 500 GB and I can successfully plug it in and get it to run as a secondary master while my old drive remains the primary master and boot drive. However, I've now lost the ability to use my CD-ROM and DVD drives, which are both IDE. Whenever I boot, the motherboard will detect the two hard drives, but not the CD/DVD drives. I think there's something limiting the system because of the IDE hard drive being used in concert with the SATA drive. The two CD/DVD drives are connected to the secondary IDE port on the motherboard and both are now jumpered as slaves, though I think that's not right, but I'm not sure what the best way is to get my drives back. I was hoping to do a drive image of my old drive onto my new one so I would just move everything to the new drive, but if I don't have a CD-ROM/DVD drive that works, it does no good. One possibility is to go to one CD/DVD drive and have that be a slave to the primary IDE drive, but the problem there is the IDE cable isn't long enough to do the job. Are there other alternatives I'm not thinking of that would save me having to either get a new cable or restructuring the insides of my computer?

[weegeebored]

You can't have two slaves (or for that matter, two masters) on the same IDE channel. Make one of your CD-Rom drives a master by changing the jumper.

[sterlingice]

Or, the easiest thing, is to just make them cable select- that way the IDE port knows by their position on the cable and you don't have to get into any sticky jumper situations.

SI