Ok, I just installed a new hard drive and a new burner.

For the burner, I used cords that were made for a burner and were not in use.

For the hard drive, I used cords from my old cd reader. The cereal cord was labeled for a cd reader, but I was told that was just for the manufacturer and it should still work...

So I now have:

A useless reader that is not connected to anything

A burner which seems useless because I cannot detect its presence

A 500mb hard drive that I was going to put linux on

A 30gig drive that I was going to put windows and a fat32 partition on.

Please help! What do I do!

How are you trying to detect the burner? In the bios setup? Or are you trying to boot from it to install your system? I can't really tell what your problem is. Is the burner using its own cable or sharing with a hard drive? If it's sharing are the jumpers on the drive set correctly (i.e. to slave if the other is master)? If it's a matter of booting is your bios set to boot from the cd? I'm assuming that you have no operating system installed, is that right?

O.F.

nope, I use mandrake w/ gnome, and just double-clicked 'computer' which lists floppy, filesystem, and network. Nothing is sharing a cable, but the hard drive is using a cable originally intended for a cd reader. It's not got anything to do with booting, right now I just need to get windows on a cd (its a legal version but I lost the cd)

And yes, I have mandrake linux w/ gnome

I'm not sure what the problem with the flat ribbon connectors (that you reference as cables).
The FRCs , assuming your are using IDE or EIDE are standard and it is irrelevant what device is connected at the end; it could be a Hard drive, a cdrom, a dvd or for that matter whatever device you want (so long uses the IDE/EIDE interface ofcourse) to plug into them.

So, departing from that point; did you make sure that the HD is set to master and the second HDD is set to salve (using the jumpers in the drives).
You can use the secondary HDD connector to plug the CD rom ( as master).
Once that is done the hardware should be recognized and you can start your software configurations at will.

Hope this helps.

Rick

Sounds like you have the burner hooked up wrong.Play around with it untill your bios detects it.Press F1 or whatever to enter bios and see if it is detected,if not check the jumper setting and whatever way you have it connected.Both need to be the same.

And is the cable plugged in the right way around? Is the 1 pin on the moboard connected to the 1 pin on the drive?

O.F.

As a side comment, please choose more descriptive titles for your threads. "Urgent please help" gives no clue as to what the actual question might be, which reduces the likelihood that people who might be able to answer your question will read it. -- J.W.