i put in a new board and now im having problems getting the cdrw to work. when the computer starts up and checks all the drives, is shows up under secondary master. but when the desktop loads and i goto "my computer" it shows all my hdd's including the slave drive under the cdrw, but the burner wont show up. whats going on?

Sounds a hell of a lot like drivers. Check manufacturers website for latest drivers.

thanks i'll try that. are there any other possiblities? a friend of mine said it cant be a problem with the burner or ide cable because its shown with all the drives at start-up.

Yeah, it is definetly a driver issue. I would download the newest drivers, delete the old ones, restart the system, and reinstall the drivers.

Also, check to see if there is a firmware update for the motherboard and drive. This might be a known issue for your mobo.

well the firmware update for the drive said "no drive detected". so i couldnt update anything. and the update for my board errors out while decompressing, and i got it from the actual site.

DL it again. Happens often when the file is fine. If not, do a complete hardware scan in XP. Tip-if you change your computer role to server or something similar, you can change hardware something like 11-12 times as opposed to the desktop 3. ;)

are you talking about the xp OS? because im still running 98se. i was going to do a clean install with 2k, but i cant get the drive to work. and im not sure what you mean by changing the role, i dont know much about making my computer into a server, if thats what youre talking about.

well, ive dl'ed the board drivers 3 times, and it does the same thing everytime. it gets to 1%(installing GART driver components) and then says "an error occured while launching the setup"

Well, if you just want to do a clean install then get into the BIOS and make the CD drive the first boot device, save the changes, then exit. Put the Win 2000 CD in and it will promt you to push a key to boot from the CD-Rom. push any key and it will send you into Windows setup.

What Polygon said. If you were like many power users and copid 98 cabs to your HDD, just run setup and it should pick up drivers for it.

jesus christ!!!! if its not one thing its another. well thanks to all for the help, i got the cdrw to work again=)

but now im having another problem. my system randomly freezes or shuts off/resets by itself. it doesnt matter what im doing, itll just do it. im not sure if the problem is software/registry based, or if its my board. i was reading up on outpost.com and i noticed that my board, epox 8rda+ nvidia, isnt listed as being thoroughbred ready. and i got a thoroughbred processor because they were out of the normal 2100xp retail versions. could that cause a problem?

im most likely going back this weekend and getting the asus a7n8x nforce2 deluxe board, which is throroughbred ready. btw, what is thoroughbred? is it better or worse than the original athlon xp processors?

I'm not too keen on certain AMD processors so I am not too sure of the differences. If the board however; isn't meant top handle that processor, that would explain a lot. I would switch out the mobo or the CPU.

going by the stats, the board should be able to handle it. its capable up to 2800+. although since im going to do a clean install anyways, i want the right hardware, so i guess ill get the asus board and exchange the t-bred.