loninappleton

The motherboard has the standard primary and secondary plugs.

The CDROM was on the Secondary Master.

I next tried to get some repsonse by changing the the ribbon cable,
using the master plug and jumpering to master on my spare CDROM
drive.

Welp, the drive functions just as the installed Samsung. The power opens
mad closes the drive tray but the computer insists nothing is installed.


Now I am stumped. I'm thinking there is something shot at the drive
controller level on the motherboard.

Other option would be to see if I can get any action out of the CDROM
if plugged to primary. That means taking the Dell hard drive out.


Has anyone seen a problem like this before? The machine is absolutely clean
but it can't find the CDROM drive at all-- at least not on secondary.