[TriLUG] hardware question - IDE problem

Greg Brown gregbrown at mindspring.com
Wed Oct 30 09:54:47 EST 2002


I've been fighting with my new-to-me Dell Optiplex PII for a day now.  The
problem is that my BIOS does not see the the CDROM if, and only if, the hard
drive is installed.

I have two IDE busses on this machine (which I believe are named IDE0 and
IDE1).  If I put the disk on IDE0 without the CDROM present the machine
attempts to boot off the disk.  If I put the CDROM on the end or the middle
of the same IDE cable as the disk the machine will not see the CDROM.  The
same is true if the CDROM is placed on IDE0.

If I remove the disk and put the CDROM on the chain all by itself I can boot
from the CDROM.  If I put the hard disk on the same IDE (or other IDE) the
CDROM is not seen by the machine.

I've swapped drives (three times) and CDROMs (twice) and used a vast
combination of the hardware at the house in order to correct this problem
but the problem persists.

Any ideas?  Am I missing something?  I didn't think you could set irqs on
CDROMs or hard disks but I checked for a conflict anyway and didn't see any
jumpers where the irq could be modified.

Greg




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