help a hardware noob?

[sdean]

Ok, to start things off i'm a total noob when it comes to hardware, today was the first day I've ever opened my case with the intention of installing new hardware. So here's the deal, I installed a new hard drive. I installed this drive in order to have more storage on my pc, I already have another running properly. I put it in and set it up on the same IDE cable as my dvd-rw drive. I set the new hd as the master and the dvd drive as the slave. After this I closed the case, and got my new hard drive set up and formatted. Everything was working fine until I noticed that my sound wasn't working. So being the noob that I am, I thought well maybe I should open my case and set the dvd drive and the hard drive to the cable select option. I did this, and after I finished and started my computer again I found that neither the hard drive nor the dvd drive were being noticed by my pc. It's as though neither are installed or something. My question is did I ruin both my hard drive and my dvd drive by changing them from master and slave to the cable select option? (I am pretty sure that my computer supports the cable select option, seeing as to the fact that the dvd drive was set to this option when I first opened my case.)

Thanks for sticking with me and reading this probem of mine, I would really appreciate any help I can get.

Thanks so much,
Stuart

 

[peterhuang913]

There is something called the BIOS. You can check that computer's BIOS.

 

[phucng_10]

Are you using the same IDE cable for the DVDr/w and your HDD? Might want to separate them so it won't be confusing. I'm guessing you're probably running onboard audio. Is this a prebuilt computer?

 

[sdean]

Thanks for the input. Here's the deal.

Yes i'm using the same IDE cable for both the DVDr/w and my HDD. The thing is my motherboard only has one IDE connection. This is a prebuilt computer. Yeah, I don't really know what to check in the BIOS. I was getting a message when I turned on my computer that drive 4 could not be detected (or something along those lines). So I turned off the drive in the BIOS to avoid getting this message everytime I powered up.

 

[phucng_10]

Usually I rather use 2 IDE cables for both my HDD and DVDr/w but I'm currently using SATA. Try using the primary IDE just for the HDD, don't hook up your DVDr/w and see what's goes on.

 

[nerdygeek]

If everything was working except the sound I would go back to the original setup where everything was working and just try and get a new audio driver.

 

[sdean]

Thanks for the help guys. I went back in and found out that the power wasn't even connected to the HDD that was originally set as master, I unplugged it when I changed both devices to cable select and forgot to plug it back in. So now everything works, even the audio (had to update the driver). Anyways thanks again everyone!