My dad has a Dell 2400 with 2 cd drives, 1 is a cd-rw drive. For some reason it started opening and closing by itself contsantly. It would even do it when the computer is booting up. The one that opens and closes by itself is just a regular cd drive. He said he never uses this one so I just unplugged both cables from it. Now since I done that, under my computer neither cd drive shows up. Also he has two hard drives and only drive c is showing up.
Would they not be showing up because I unplugged the cd drive? The drive that I unplugged is on the top if that makes a difference. What would cause it to open and close by itself? Since I unplugged the drive, I have not checked to see if the other one still reads cd's. Do I need to go into the bios and put the second cd drive on top of the boot sequence?
The two were chained together. Connect the top plug of the IDE cable to the other drive and set it as a 'master' to fix that.
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IDE is the bigger cable right? So you're saying hook up the IDE cable to the cd drive that I unplugged and set it as master? How do I set it as master?
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The IDE cable is the one that looks like a belt cable. There should be two plugs on that cable, use the one at the end of the cable not the other one. To set the drive as master, look on the rear end of the drive and there should be a place with 8 little pins. On two of those vertically there is a little cap. Remove that cap and put on the farthest right two pins (vertically) That should fix it.
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Are you saying to set the cd drive that I unplugged as the master? Just want to make sure. Why would I set that one as the master when it is not going to be used?
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No, set the other one as the master.
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Okay, I will try that and let you know how it went. Thanks for the help.
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no problem, if that doesnt work we'll move the pin to a new jumper till we get the right one!
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I did not get it to work. Should I move it to the next one over?
Well I put the jumper pin back in the original spot since none of the other spots worked. And I hooked both cables up to the cd drive that was opening and closing by itself and now both cd drives show up and it is not opening and closing by itself.
After I moved the jumper pin, should I have opened the cd drives? Because after I hooked everything back up in the original spot and opened the drives, they showed up. Also there are only 6 pins.
The second hard drive is still not showing up. I might unhook both cables on the hard drive and hook it back up and see if it works.
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