Hey everyone

I recently bought a new Maxter 40GB HDD. I installed it and used Disk Management to format it and prep it for using XP. Unfortunately, I accidentially partitioned it to my DVD-ROM letter.

Now, my computer refuses to acknowledge a DVD-ROM device at all. I've taken the hardware out, put it back in, checked my BIOS for the boot, everything. It is as if I have no hardware connected at all. Device manager doesn't even have a category dedicated to optical devices (I only have the one DVD-ROM).

I don't think I can even format my PC because of this because the DVD-ROM is not even recognized as a POSSIBLE boot option.

The device is an AOpen PC CD-RW/DVD-ROM with the only codes on the label saying "TMOC41252" and "COM5232/AAH Pro".

Any support would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

A bit of "progress"...

I've swapped the CDRW/DVD-ROM with another in the house, and I have the same results.

I'm using an ASUS K8V-X motherboard, so I am guessing it is a motherboard issue, but I've done everything I can think of. I've uninstalled the IDE secondary (which is what it was attached to), reinstalled the latest BIOS I can find, (v. 1010.001), everything.

I cannot reformat because even my BIOS won't recognize a CD-ROM as a possible boot device, so I can't possibly boot from CD.

This is a pretty serious problem, and I'm at a total loss.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

You say it's on the Secondary IDE channel. Is that the same channel as the new HD as this problem is typical of the jumper settings being set the same for both devices on the channel. The Bios would only recognise 1 device as well.
Also you need to make sure that the IDE cable is correctly connected, like the end connector goes to the master & the middle connector to the slave.

Are you able to open & close the DVD-ROM?

I don't believe that Disk Management would allow you to assign the same letter to 2 devices, so at the time of formatting the new HD the DVD-ROM was not being detected.

Thanks for the reply!

No, the new HDD (to which I have removed from the system entirely) was attached to my primary IDE on the second set of pins. In short, my Primary HDD and Secondary HDD were on the same IDE line, attached to the Primary IDE channel (which I believe is the BLUE coloured connector on the motherboard).

I followed one of the troubleshooting ideas I found on this forum which suggested that I uninstall the IDE ATA/ATAPI unit attached to the DVD-ROM and reboot. When I did this, the Secondary IDE never was detected when I rebooted. I ended up having to download the VIA 4-1 driver pack for this motherboard and chipset again which solved that problem. But the DVD-ROM remains inoperable.

As per your other question, no I cannot open and close the drive. However, upon booting, the power supply does initialize the drive by lighting up its green LED for a moment. This doesn't mean it's attempting to boot from it, because BIOS still doesn't recognize it as a drive.

I believe the source of the problem lies on the motherboard and the IDE2 line not seeing the device attached to it.

Thanks for the reply, though!

Try attaching the dvd-rom as slave on the primary IDE channel & the new HD as master on the secondary IDE channel.
If this the dvd-rom then works but the new HD doesn't then either there is a problem with the mobo OR the ide cable is faulty & you need another.
If the dvd-rom was originally slave on the primary & you've now just used another IDE cable then I'd suspect that cable as being the problem.

The only thing i can sugest is that you connect your boot HDD to IDE port 1 as master, and the ROM as slave.

Your new drive as master on IDE port 2.

Make sure the BIOS has detected them, and then use a win 98 startup disk to fdisk your new drive as an extended logical drive, and then to format it.

Being as its only a 40 GB drive fdisk should have no probs doing this.

colin.

One thing I do is go into the bios & find the setting to reset settings to default. THis has got lots of computers going for me.