Two cd-rom drives in one PC?

[Zippo]

How I can get two cd-rom drives to work in same pc? Is the problem in MSCDEX, I can't get it work in two drive at same time?

[chrisp]

Having two CD-ROMS shouldn't be a problem provided they are not incompatible.

Things to check:

Make sure the secondary IDE is enabled in the BIOS (refer to your manual).

Connect one drive to the primary IDE and the other to the secondary IDE.

Make sure all the jumpers are set correctly on the drives.

If need swap the drives around so that the primary becomes secondary etc.

If all these are correct the drive should work. It's best to have the bIOS set to auto detect the drives (refer to manual) as this avoid the need to set up manually.

Some drives don't like working as the fourth drive, this is very much a case of try it and see. Also some drives just don't work together, again it's trial and error.

[Halifax101]

I have two installed. All I've done is set one to Secondary Master and the other to Slave. They work like a champ.

[Mikelh]

What brand of Drives?
What brand of computer?

Some proprietary CDROM Drives, like some Gold Star, are not ATAPI, therefore will not work from the Motherboard. They need a soundcard IDE connection.

Michael

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"The Most Important Things in Life are not Things"

[Zippo]

I forget to tell that second drive has interface card and I don't know jumper settings for that (I don't have manual).
These are my drives:
Creative 24Xmx
Unknown 4X drive whit interface card

[TeeDub]

The other has an interface card?! So it fits into a sound card? (That is a tertiary port right guys?)

Windows will not see the other port off of the sound card (at least not without the right soundcard drivers.) And a lot of these older CDROMs have proprietary pin-outs so they cannot just be "slaved" off the IDE. You may be better off just spending the $35 to get a new CDROM.

[clock]

I'm wondering if this is the right thing to do. Followed instrustions according to a CDRW manual and am having my hardisk on the Primary IDE (set as master), on the Secondary IDE I have the Creative 6424CDRW set as master along with a Creative iNFRA 36oo (24X) set as slave. Have been burning CDs with this configuration ever since. Not really sure if it's burning fast enough (sometimes I get 4X write speed and even 2X at times) but nonetheless I'm satisfied with the copies I get. Is it true that having both the CD Drives on the same IDE bus reduces speed of file transfer? A friend suggested that I put the normal CD drive on Primary (slave) and leave the CDRW on Secondary IDE (master) in order to increase burning capability.



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clock
time is against us

[This message has been edited by clock (edited 04-25-2000).]