My optical drives went south a few months ago,so I bought a IDE(Raid) 2 port PCI host card intending to use it instead of my secondary IDE channel. I have a Fatal1ty KN8-SLI mobo with 3 gb of ram, 2 sata hdd (200gb &300gb) an 80gb C drive primary IDE master and a 40gb drive as the slave on the same channel. I saw something in another part of this forum about the bending pin syndrome on the ide plugs and I think that might be what happened. At any rate, after installing the controller card, I still have no access to any of my optical drives. Any suggestions?
Check the pins
Sun, 2008-11-16 09:36 by admin
I would first have a good look at the pins. If one is bent, you would see it and could even, with a little bit of luck, bend it back straight again. That would be a better solution than to add an extra controller. As you are experiencing, an extra IDE controller can add new problems.
Did the controller come with a driver? Or can it use the drivers that are already in Windows? What do you see in Device Manager? Check the resources there, like interrupts and memory address ranges. The addresses must not overlap those of any other device. Interrupts can normally be shared in Windows XP and Vista.
If your optical drive fails on one controller and also fails on another, this raises a new suspicion, namely that the drive or its data or power cable is broken. Does it work on another computer? Check also the master/slave jumper.