Do they share the controller on the IDE hard drive? I have an IDE CD rom and I removed the IDE hard drive and now the CD rom wont work. I thought the hard drive was bad but now I'm not positively sure.

Generally speaking, no they don't depend on each other. That said, older BIOSes might not recognize the drive if it's jumper is set to 'CS' (cable select.) Switch the jumper on the CD ROM to 'Master' and attach the drive to the 'end' of the IDE ribbon, ensure the power supply is powering the drive adequately, then go into your BIOS at boot up and see if the BIOS can see the drive. If it sees the CD-ROM, you can try pulling the CD-ROM out, and replace it with the potentially bad hard drive, ensuring that the hard drive's jumper is on 'MA' (Master) and see if the system recognizes it.

Something as simple as a loose power cable can cause older motherboards to go very buggy. Also, make sure your IDE cable is attached correctly; older IDE cables don't always have a 'notch' to indicate which way the cable is supposed to plug in.

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Hi,

It would depend on how the drives are configured. Master for hdd, Slave for cdrom. If you remove the hdd then the cdrom drive would have to be reconfigured as single/master.

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It would be normal to use either both or one at a time on any ide that I have ever seen. Bios may be part of the issue. What does it say after you remove one?

I had to reinstall Madriva 08 because I updated hotplugging away. It must have been a dynamic library problem. Mandriva has an easy and forward interface and installation but they really should iron out there installation problems. I had to install it five times before DrakePrint or whatever would work and I could connect to the internet at the same time. I even had to install Mandriva 10 twice because the menus would flicker at a million times a second.After I got Mandriva 08 back and running the mouse would freeze. I lost some files with it while clicking and dragging a week ago so I was a little suspicious about my hard drive. They were no where to be found. Windows was crashing as well so I though my hard drive was gone. After I got ALL of my files saved BIOS could not detect my hard drive. I thought how great is was I got everything saved because Windows had the accumulation of five years of computing on it. It was sort of a scrap book. This mess is compounded because I though that I could keep Grub on both the drives and just switch which drive it would boot from in BIOS but this didnt work. I have had a funny metallic grinding noise from My computer but thought it was the Deskstar hard drive I had but I have two drives so no big deal.I removed the suspect hard drive because I thought it was toast. I wanted to keep my CD rom so I was playing around with it. It would work fine for Windows but Mandriva would not operate it. I was ready to go out and buy a hard drive when I posted in this forum because I was getting the impression that maybe the CD ROM had an internal short and was effecting the hard drive. I hooked up the hard drive like suggested and it worked fine.BIOS detected it and everything. I put a new CD ROM in from BestBuy and everything is fine except my disappointment in Mandriva 10 so far. It's snazzier but you have to update it to get hot plugging to work. When you do an update it states that it could not retrieve all of the files. This is kind of a turn off from where I'm coming from. Soundjuicer if it works at all takes FOREVER to load. I installed Fedora 13 while I was at it so maybe I will move to that distro if Mandriva 08 really is outdated to oblivion. Must of the bugs I had are now gone from 08 so getting rid of the garbage worked wonders. Madriva 10 is looking like a piece of crap so far.It's embarrassing and is not measuring up to the 08 release.

Thanks for the Help!