Setting dual DVD and no floppy

[tomween1]

My mobo is the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I have relocated it to a new full tower set up. In doing this I have run into problems having the board find a second DVD drive installed. In the BIOs it shows the first dvd drive installed but not the second. I thought, possibly, it was mistaking the second drive as a floppy. I disconnected the floppy in the BIOs and then lost all drives. Though this set up was working in the previous case, I'm not sure what has changed. I decided to change the jumper, in the back of the second dvd unit, but haven't installed it yet.

So what am I doing wrong? Was it right to change the jumper. Will that fix the problem?

Thanks, Tom

[The Wise Monkey]

Are they IDE drives or SATA drives?

Since you are talking about jumpers, I assume they are IDE, in which case you need to specifically set one as the master drive and one as the slave drive by changing the jumpers on the back.

[tomween1]

Thanks. Yes they are ide and that's exactly what I did. Yep you were right it did work. My only confusion is, why did it work before? All these components came out of the last system and were put directly into this case. They all worked before.

Thanks, Tom

[The Wise Monkey]

It could be because most hard drives have a "cable select" option that automatically assigns a master and a slave setting depending on which part of the cable the drive is attached to. The jumper was probably set to this, and the motherboard would have decided what to do. Newer motherboards might not offer this functionality since IDE is really a deprecated technology now.