I bought a generic 52x24x52 CDRW drive at Circuit City last week for a whopping $9.99 after rebate. I have installed it into a Pentium 166/128MB RAM/2.1GB HD running Slack 8.1. I already had an old NEC 8x CD-ROM that I wanted to leave in the system so I could copy CDs directly. Originally this drive was the secondary IDE master (/dev/hdc). I read that it's bad to put 2 optical drives in the same chain, so I decided to put the NEC drive as the primary slave (primary master is the HD) and make the CDRW drive secondary master.

With this setup, I booted the machine and was able to open/close the CDRW drive. Startup messages showed that the OS recognized the HD and then the NEC drive (as /dev/hdb). Startup briefly paused, then booting continued without mention of the CDRW. I cannot get the OS to recognize the CDRW under this configuration. Jumper settings on all three are correct.

I rebooted and went into BIOS setup, and the CDRW drive is not shown there (but the other two drives are). I tried to force it to recognize the drive (manually enabling secondary IDE master) but that did not help. I figured I'd gotten a bad unit. I removed the NEC drive completely, and put the CDRW as primary slave. Voila, BIOS and OS recognize the CDRW without problems.

So... this brings up a few questions.

1. How can I make the CDRW work by itself on Secondary IDE channel? (I tried both 'Master' and 'Cable Select' jumper settings on it, but neither helped.) I'm aware that I will need to use SCSI emulation to write to a CD... but that doesn't affect basic reading functions, does it? Shouldn't the drive work fine as a CD-ROM without emulating SCSI?

2. Will my slow system support direct copying from disc to disc? I'm assuming that I could only copy at 8x speed, since that's the speed of the CD-ROM, but that would be OK, I suppose. Is it worth the effort to try and fix the problem I described, or will performance be too crappy?

3. If I were to install the CDRW as the primary slave, would this affect the performance (speed) of CD burning? Will it make my hard drive slower?


Thanks for bearing with me through all this. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

IT MAYBE YOUR OLD DRIVE IS BAD TRY TAKING IT OUT OR YOUR MOTHERBORD DOSE NOT SUPORT 2 DEVICES ON THE PRIMARY SLOT OR YOUR MOTHERBORD IS BAD

The old drive works fine--I installed the OS with it, and was able to mount it as recently as yesterday. I used to have a second HD as slave on the primary IDE, so I think that should work.

that would not work your OS my stop resonding eser and may have issues booting

well, i suppose something was not working the way it was supposed to. i was able to mount the drive from Slackware and write/read to it.