Okay, so i got myself a IDE HD of 120 gb, and i hooked it up with my IDE cable, which is also linking my CDROM drive to my motherboard. Booted up the box, and went into BIOS settings, checked boot prio, confirmed it was CD>Flash>HD>Disabled and rebooted. It didn't really react to the disk in my CDROM drive (a winXP disk), but went on to boot the HD, which contains an old windows install that i don't have access to. So, i rebooted again, went into BIOS, and saw that it didn't detect no IDE Slave, only the Maxtor HD. I tried switching the order (linking the HD on the slave slot, and CDROM on the master slot, no difference. Then i removed the HD completely, and it booted the windows disk with no problems. As soon as i reconnect the HD it skips the CDdrive again.

I then went on to plug the harddisk into my other box alongside it's CDROM, this box is running a SATA primary HD, but this time it refused to detect the IDE HD.

I'm terrilbly confused. All i wanna do is format and install an XP on it, but i just can't get it to work at the same time as my CDROM drive.

As i can't get the box running, i'm not certain what's inside, i've got an Asus motherboard with "M2R-FVM/VP/S" written on it, there's power on everything (confirmed by drives working individually) and the IDE cable's golden aswell, worked perfectly on the old HD two days ago.

I have no idea what to do.

I think you need to check your jumpers on the hdd and the cdrom in order to them to work together.

Section 3.3.1 of the following document explains the jumper setting.

DiamondMax Plus 9 60/80/120/160/200GB AT Product Manual:
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/maxt ... manual.pdf

I would try the jumper setting that is described as ...

"Drive is configured as a Master with an attached slave that does not support DASP"

Jumper your optical drive as a slave.

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