drive sequence
 

Is there a specific sequence for IDE drives? I have placed my HD as Primary Master, my cd-rw as secondary master and my dvd-rom as secondary slave; there is nothing for primary slave. However, my dvd-rom is not recognized by the BIOS. In fact when i boot into the BIOS and try to detect it,i find it, but when i reboot it doesn't seem to exist. However, all OSes seem to find it every time. Any ideas?

No special sequence should be needed. Your looks OK. Do you have secondary slave set to auto?

there seems to be quite a bit of debate on this subject, but i haven't seen much real evidence of "the answer"

one thing of note that i would suggest, i would put one optical drive as slave on the primary, and one on the secondary chain. because of the speed limitations of optical drives (and the throughput/duplex limitations of ide), you may have issues with doing "on the fly" cd duplications with both on the same ide channel.

just my $.02

I have now set the cd-rw sa secondary master and the dvd-rom as secondary slave and both are been recognised fine. The opposite however (dvd-rom master and cd-rw as slave) hadn't work. Why?

On the IDE cable i am using for my optical drives, a "hard disk cable" is written as i just noticed. There is another cable with "cd-rom" on it. Have i used the wrong one? Should i change it, or there will be no difference?
Thanks

Did you move the jumpers on the back of the optical drives to denote master and slave?

Hmmm...
It always has been my understanding , that the best configuration would be to have each of the optical drives as a slave to a harddrive.(Two IDE-HDs-scenario)
Has something to do with posing the least risc for boot-problems , or so i'm told...