My old DVD writer stopped reading discs. I'd put a disc in, but it would never spin up.

I took a newer one out of another system to check to make sure it was the drive which was faulty. The new one worked fine.

I bought a new one so I could put the other good one back in the other system.

Now, however, neither of my DVD/CD drives are recognized by my computer at all. I've double-checked to make sure everything's plugged in correctly, but nothing at all shows up in Windows. In the BIOS, I have the following:

First IDE Master: Maxtor HDD
First IDE Slave: Not Installed
Second IDE Master: Seagate HDD
Second IDE Slave: Not Installed
Third IDE Master: Not Installed
Third IDE Slave: Not Installed
Fourth IDE Master: Not Installed
Fourth IDE Slave: Not Installed

My optical drivers normally showed up in the third IDE entries. If I go into Third IDE Slave and change the setting to "auto", it changes to "Third IDE Slave: S_NY". Still nothing in Windows. I restarted my PC and now it says "SONY" instead of "S_NY". Changing Third IDE Master doesn't do anything.

I have two optical drives connected: one Lite-On DVDRW drive (normally D: drive in Windows, model iHaP422-08 8), and one Sony CDRW drive (normally E: in Windows).

There's only one submenu in the BIOS which deals with optical drives at all and I've done everything I know to do in the relevant one.

When I put the other DVD writer in, I didn't have to mess with the BIOS at all; everything worked fine straight away.

I've checked that everything is plugged in correctly for a third time.

What could the problem be?

Maybe the motherboard's BIOS has a bug. Are you using the latest BIOS version? It's pretty common for motherboard manufacturers to release updated BIOS versions to support newer hardware, so you can try updating it if you haven't done so already. It's perfectly safe if you follow the instructions step by step.

Why would the BIOS have a bug now but not two hours ago?

Nevermind, I figured it out. Turned out to be an ID-10-T error. :dunce:

I pulled the drive out to find a little jumper bridging two pins labeled "slave". I moved the jumper to the two labeled "master", put the drive back in, booted up and everything works perfectly.

Thanks for the help.

I'll add a tangent question here to avoid making a new thread:

For some reason both of my burning programs say that this new drive is not capable of Disc-At-Once burning. My old burner did Disc-At-Once without issue.
The specs definitely say it's capable of DAO:

http://us.liteonit.com/us/inde ... &id=250&Itemid=67

Quote :

Support Fixed Packet, Variable Packet, TAO, SAO, DAO, Random Access Write, Incremental, sequential recording restricted overwrite, Layer Jump recording, Raw Mode Burning & Over-Burn

I've gone into the drive properties but there's nothing there. Anyone know how to enable this feature?

Anybody?