weird cd drive problem

[Illegal Amigo]

I have two cd-rom drives that won't open when connected to IDE, but when just connected to the power supply, they open fine. Anyone have any ideas?

I've tried new ide cables, different power cords, different drives even. They open until they're plugged into the motherboard, then the light doesn't even come on when it's booting up.

Please post if you have any ideas, it's driving my dad and I nuts.

 

[DrDevin]

Do you have the right jumper settings on the drives? and is your BIOS set to recognise new drives every time you boot up or is it configured wrong?

 

[Hazar]

you sure that you have the new cables? These one's have a whole bunch more wires than the old ones.

I had similar problems... and I was using the old ribbon cables.

 

[Illegal Amigo]

I'm using ribbon cables too... when I said new I meant different. Sorry for the confusion. The jumper settings are all set, and the drives work fine when not plugged into the motherboard. Sorry for the confusion. We're still playing around with it, so any ideas are helpful.

 

[CyberS@int]

Points to note: ribbon cables often need to be plugged in to a specific drive ie. there is a master and slave socket and must be connected to the related master or slave drive. sometimes setting both drives to cs or cable select will cure this trouble.
one other thing to try is putting one of the drives as a slave to the hard drive and the other on a cable of its own.
like someone else asked..does the bios recognise it when you start up?