• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

CD drive stops hard drive from working

scrubsy

New Member
Joined
Sep 2, 2017
Messages
3
I have a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66 and when I got the system it seemed like the cd drive wasn't working. I pulled everything out, cleaned and and put it all back in. I thought I had everything hooked up properly, but that is where the problems began. When the hard drive and cd drive are plugged in together (cd drive on the end, hard drive in the middle) with cd listed as slave both don't work. I unhook the cd and remove the jumper from the hard drive and it boots just fine. I have tried every combo of master/slave and it just makes the hard drive not work. Any thoughts?
 
Some early IDE drives are notoriously bad when working with other drives. Although by the time of the DX2-66 usually the bumps were ironed out. What are the model no.'s of the HDD and CD-ROM?

Are you 100% sure the CD drive is IDE? Could be one of those proprietary IDE look-a-likes, that connects to the sound card.
 
Does the CDROM drive have a master and slave jumper (this will tell you if it is IDE or not)? CDROM should be set to slave, IDE HD to master.

I have a slim Gateway2000 486 DX2/50 and the CDROM drive is a proprietary Sony I think (connects to the sound card not IDE).

The CDROM will not be bootable anyway, and you will need drivers in Config.sys and Autoexec.bay for DOS.
 
Try swapping the cable around. CD Rom is most likely u/s though. Got a spare IDE CDRom you can try out? As mentioned you'll need dos drivers.

As an experiment you could use the PLOP 5.0.13 boot loader (linux based) on floppy disk to see it that detects the cd rom. Just have a bootable cd, say win98 or Dam Small Linux in the cd drive and see if it tries to boot it.
 
Last edited:
Is it possible you are getting the CD drives jumper on the cable select position instead of slave? Since it's on the end of the cable it might confuse the system.
 
I do remember encountering some HDDs where there were two different jumper configurations for Master, depending on whether or not it would be the only drive on the cable. If there is a second jumper in the jumper block that might not be labeled, try removing it, it might be the "single drive" jumper.

Off the top of my head I think Maxtor was the common offender for this.
 
What Stone said. I've got a few IDE devices that will not work with any relatively modern (<15 yo) hard disk on the same IDE bus, this is regardless of being jumpered for master or slave The only way to use them is to give them their own bus.
 
Back
Top