It wasn't easy, but I finally got the CD-RW installed and the computer put back together. The first 5 or so tries were unsuccessful for one reason or another. It's been a while since I've done much work inside of a computer so I was a little leary of delving inside. I figured it was worth it to try to save the $40-$50 installation fee. Luckily the box was very easy to open. The CD-RW is an IDE device, and there was one connection left on the cable, but it wouldn't reach the back of the drive, so I had to switch the cables on the other devices, including the power cables and jumpers. I didn't realize that it doesn't matter which drive, Master or Slave, is on which part of the cable, so it made the connections even tighter than they should have been.

Upon hooking all the cables back up and seeing the message that the computer wouldn't boot and I needed an emergency disk was a bit of a shock. I thought I had somehow fried a drive because I used the wrong power cable. I then took out the original, and now second CD drive and used the new drive in it's place, putting all the jumpers and cables back the way they were originally and it booted, but the new drive wasn't recognized. Come to find out one the jumper on one of the devices had been set wrong originally and had somehow worked. Once I set it correctly, the drive was recognized. Yee haw. With that shot of confidence, and after I finally figured out that the position of the device on the cable didn't matter, I figured I could switch all the cables and get the 2 CD drives installed together. With the proper jumpers set and cables connected, I booted and both drives appeared.

What should have been a very simple procedure turned out not to be, which is usually the case when I tackle a job like this. Even so, getting everything to work properly, and finally backing up nearly all my data files onto one CD, was a major victory. I bought the TDK veloCD-RW drive that was highly rated in one of the PC magazines. And for once it was good that a snot-nosed kid, the kind that I usually disparage as not knowing anything, was available to help me decide which one to buy. He'd used the veloCD and liked the software that was included. I fugured the advice couldn't have come from a better source.
posted by Bruce Wright at 6:08 PM #