CDR problem

[steved]

Hi folks,

I've a customer with a generic CDrewriter attached to the Secondary Master. His Cdrom was attached the the Secondary Slave.

The problem is that if he leaves the machine switched off overnight it will not detect the CDR in IDE2. The BIOS also doesn't recognise it. After a number of boots everything is back to normal and it works perfectly. We thought it might have something to do with power supply so all the cables have been checked. He was also advised by someone else to upgrade the BIOS...as expected this has made no difference.
A service engineer is now advising him to replace the motherboard! I think this is way off the mark. I got him to put the CDR as slave to the Hard drive..and it worked first time. As this isn't a perfect configuration I'm getting him to try and put the CDrom onto the Primary Slave and leave the CDR on its own on IDE2. He still has too get back to me.

I was wondering if anyone had any other suggestions that I could try?

thanks in advance

[djr84709135]

If you are getting intermittent detection, I would try.. 1. Slave in another CD or 2. test his CD-R on another system. Could be controller is failing. 3.Disable UDMA for ide2 in bios, uncheck DMA transfer in device manager. 4. Check PCI bus in device manager. See if IRQ steering is enabled. If he's out of IRQ's, bios and windows won't always enumerate drive. Use sysinfo, check sharing and hardware conflicts. (actually the last sounds most probable, if the drive tests O.K. If so, remove some other device using IRQ (check disable in this hardware profile) and see if it will enumerate reliably. In BIOS, enable "reset configuration data" or similar and reboot. ~D.