A wee bit of diagnostic help here. I built my UPS driver a computer from spare parts left from all my upgrades. Gave him a WinXP machine, 512MB of ram (164pin), 2x40GB HDD's (no raid), P3 850mhz, sblive (no live! drive), 56K modem, 10/100NIC 16x DVD-rom 32x CD-RW All for about $150 (a copy of WinXP and the case basically) My problem is that the CD-RW which came directly out of my old machine (replaced with DVD-RW) always reports '0 objects' in windows explorer no matter what type of game/music CD i put in there. I swapped out the cd-rw for a different (slower one) and even changed the IDE cable connecting them with no difference. Jumpers are in their right places and the IDE controllers are both set to UDMA mode 5 (PIO Only didnt work either). I'm at me wits end becaues i have no clue why windows explorer displays "0 objects" instead of "insert disc into drive f" like it normally would if the drive was empty. Changed cable, changed drive - no change. So far i suspected the power supply....sort of. First i switched the cd-rw from slave to master and the dvd-rom from master to slave. Well it still did the same thing. So i ran the system with the dvd-rom off of the ide and molex connectors. Cd-RW detected all the cds perfectly. So i figured it was a weak power supply. Well the only two power supplies i have on hand are the same wattage (300). I took the original PSU out and put a comparable PSU in that has a little bit more amp's on the 12V rail (15 over 10). Well now all the CD's are detected....detected as blank CDs, and one is Diablo and the other is a music CD! Help!
Fixed it! Turns out PIO only mode would have worked, if i realized when i put the rig together i put the CD-rom's as primary and the HDDs as secondary. when i went in to change dma to pio i did it on secondary IDE thinking it was cd-drive 2, but it was really changing hdd 2. fixed MY goof and his machine is all better.