for some reason the hard drive in my old pentium II machine was a SCSI drive that finally failed - i had been getting kernel panics on it for a while which were fixed by a little cool down time until today. I've got all the data I need off of that drive so I'll just do a fresh SUSE linux install on my new drive and copy over my personal files from backup later.

I got a new western digital 40 GB hard drive for $30 today but it's an IDE drive. So i hooked it all up but two things are causing me problems.

1) My CD drive has it's busy light on from the moment I turn on the computer. Nothing is in the CD drive. I can't eject the CD tray with the eject button. I ejected the drive with a paper clip and stuck in my SUSE linux disks but they weren't read.

2) My BIOS seems to think that I still have a SCSI drive. I found a few things to change in the BIOS and told it to boot off IDE drive instead of SCSI. When I try to autodetect an IDE drive it just comes up with 0 tracks 0 sectors, etc..

so how do I get my CD busy light to turn off? I feel that if I can get the machine to read my CD then maybe the new hard drive will be recognized.

Any help?

Here are some things to check.

Is there a scsi/ide jumper on the motherboard?
Do you have the HD and cdrom ide cables plugged into the correct ports on the motherboard and the correct position, like a floppy if you plug it in backwards the light stays on but the newer ide cables are keyed.
Are they on the same cable, if so take the hard drive and give it its own dedicated ide cable, If its on with a cdrom your HD will be much slower.
Is the cdrom bad?
Is the jumper on the back of the cdrom correct. If its the only one on the cable it should be set to master. Goto the manufacturers website and check the jumper settings.
Have you tried setting all the bios settings to default then reboot and check the light but you will have to reconfigure whatever is currently setup. Just write down the current settings then reset them after.

The CD Rom is on the same cable as a CD Burner. They are in the same configuration as before and it always worked then. but now that i look at it the one on the end of the cable is the slave and the other one is the master. i switched them and now the busy light is off and the eject button works.

Next problem was that the boot up just hung - I noticed in the manual for the drive to try an alternate jumper setting since my computer is old (P II).

Now it got past that and booted off the CD. I started the install but it just hung while trying to load modules for the hard disk controller. Before it booted off the CD I noticed a message that said SCSI controller not found. So somewhere somehow it still thinks there should be a SCSI disk.

So to summarize, I can get it to read the CD and start the install process but then it just hangs while loading modules.

Ideas? thanks.

So it seems there's still some repurcussions from the old SCSI drive. namely, when i'm doing the new install I can get it going by skipping the loading of the driver for the SCSI adapter. But then when I finish and go to boot off the hard drive i get a grub> prompt. no matter what I did there I couldn't get anything to boot off /dev/hda