[Schmerz Meister]

Ok, here's the story:

I got 2 computers, both custom made, they are primarily used for video editing on one and music editing on the other.

Here are the specifications of the music editing one:
Motherboard: Gigabyte LGA 775
Hard disks: 1. WD Caviar Blue 160 GB (IDE Connection)
2. Maxtor 100 GB (SATA Connection)
3. Maxtor 200 GB (SATA Connection)
Disk drives: 1. lite-on DVDRW shw-160p6s (IDE Connection [Master])
2. Mitsubishi CDRW (IDE Connection [Slave])
CPU: Pentium D Core Duo
Memory: 2X 1GB DDR2 800

Today, I purchased the WD Caviar Blue 160 GB Hard drive and installed it. When I turned on the computer, I put the Windows XP SP3 CD into my DVDRW drive and it would not read it. It would make clicking sounds and not read the disk. So I put the disk into my CDRW drive and it installed flawlessly. Afterwords, I was wondering what the problem was with my DVDRW drive. The problem only started happening after I installed the new hard drive. So I took out the power cable to the new hard drive and ran from my earlier operating system (XP SP2) and I had the same problem with the DVDRW drive. Puzzled, I switched the Master/Slave on the drive (CDRW is master and DVDRW is slave) and that didn't resolve the issue. I then plugged back in the new hard drive and restarted the computer. It didn't read the DVDRW or the CDRW drives AT ALL. So I thought that either the bus was messed up or the cable. I then unhooked the IDE from the new hard drive and plugged it into the DVDRW drive; it read it. So I opened up my other computer and used the same cable that was originally for the CDRW and the DVDRW drives to plug in my DVDRW drive. It read it but the same problem persisted, the drive could not read ANY disk at all. So I plugged everything back to its original state and tried it again. Same problem: the music editing computer cannot read the DVDRW or the CDRW drives. It can only read the three hard drives.

I am lost here, should I get a new DVDRW drive? Should I return the new hard drive while it's not too late? Or is there something that I'm missing here? Please help!

[philthomas]

First off, try uninstalling the IDE Controller .... goto Device Manager/IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and uninstall the Channel where the Optical Drives are located. Reboot the PC and Windows will automatically reinstall the Controller and detect and install any Drives attached.
If it's a Windows glitch, this may flush it out.

If the drive is missing/unrecognised, you could also try editing the upper/lower filters in the Registry .... see here for how.

[Schmerz Meister]

Both options were a no go. The drives do not show up in my bios at the time when I start the computer. I would replace my drives with SATA connectors but the two that I have on the motherboard are in use by my other two hard drives.