IDE Slave Removed, IDE Master Not Recognized

There was a PATA hard drive (slave) attached to the same IDE cable as my DVD burner (master), and both devices were recognized. The slave hard drive was removed, and nothing else was changed. Now when the computer boots, the DVD burner is not recognized in the BIOS.

Every jumper / cable / channel setting has been tried, and even my BIOS has been flashed. The previous hard drive was added back in to the equation in its previous position, and neither device was recognized. The board is an ABit AI7, and the primary hard drive is a WD Raptor attached on SATA1.

The IDE cable was (temporarily) ruled out as the cause of the problem since the devices were recognized fine prior to the hard drive removal. The IDE cable can be swapped and a different one used, but I am in pursuit of more probable sources that are causing this issue.

What suggestions do you have for getting the DVD burner to be recognized again?

make sure the DVD burner is set as a single, not the master.

TheOneGreatX said:

make sure the DVD burner is set as a single, not the master.

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On hard drives, Single is generally set without any jumper at all. Should this be the case with the burner as well? If so, this has been tried already, and was unsuccessful as well (every jumper / cable / channel setting has been tried).

A friend of mine seems to think the IDE cable is the most probable culprit, so I will try with a different IDE cable this evening.

Is the DVD burner at the end connector and not the middle connector?

Yeah, I would say there are two likely culprits.

1. That cable. Ive seen this quite a few times, IDE cables going bad. I HATE IDE cables..
2. The IDE controller. Give the secondary (assuming youre using the primary) channel a shot, see if they show up.

lithium726 said:

Yeah, I would say there are two likely culprits.

1. That cable. Ive seen this quite a few times, IDE cables going bad. I HATE IDE cables..
2. The IDE controller. Give the secondary (assuming youre using the primary) channel a shot, see if they show up.

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He already said every channel was tried. Most likely the ribbon broke a wire when you unplugged the HD the first time. I've had that happen.

try a different ide cable.

Ah, Missed that.

Yeah, id say its the cable then.

Thank you all for the suggestions and responses. It indeed was the cable, fortunately I suppose. The other alternative was the IDE controllers on the board which was also mentioned in this thread. Spare motherboards are not quite as easy to come by as spare IDE cables.

Thanks again!

Is it a 40-wire cable or 80-wire cable? I've seen several instances where single CD drives would not run on the 80-wire cable after the hard drive is removed.

Zamboni said:

Is it a 40-wire cable or 80-wire cable? I've seen several instances where single CD drives would not run on the 80-wire cable after the hard drive is removed.

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80-wire, I believe. What caused the single CD drive to not run on the 80-wire cable after the hard drive was removed?

int0x80 said:

80-wire, I believe. What caused the single CD drive to not run on the 80-wire cable after the hard drive was removed?

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Gremlins. I suspect it's something with the motherboard detecting the 80-wire cable and pushing the channel to a UDMA level the CD-ROM doesn't support, but I haven't spent a lot of time tracking it down. Putting the optical drives back on the old-school cables seems to fix it, so I just made it a habit to re-cable the systems that way rather than troubleshoot them.