Secondary IDE channel missing...

[Liampope]

Hello,

Noticed the other day my optical drive wasn't working (could have been like it months - shows how often I use it!). Totally missing in windows, so I reset and had a look in BIOS. Mobo is my trusty old Asus A8N SLI, by the way. Drive not there in BIOS either. Have two HDDs on primary IDE, and the optical is on secondary. Swapped the IDE cables round at the mobo, and now BIOS sees just the optical. So looks like the drive is OK, the cables are OK, but secondary IDE on the mobo is dead . Have tried various stuff like resetting BIOS, loading default values, removing battery, reflashing BIOS (various versions), poking stuff, swearing, but no joy.

Any ideas? Is the mobo dead (well secondary IDE anyway)? Damn shame if it is cos I was hoping my old bits could be sold to contribute towards the planned i5 upgrade.

Liam

 

[joey2cool]

have you tried looking at the devices manager in the control panel and seeing if there is a driver error, perhaps with the secondary IDE channel? It might be a corrupted driver, and if not, it does sound like a hardware failure...

 

[Liampope]

Nah - anything plugged into the secondary IDE channel is not even there in BIOS. Windows still shows a secondary IDE channel installed in device manager, but reports no devices.

Think you're right and the mobo has failed . Oh well the old system may still be worth something if people only need the primary IDE and SATA.