Please help?

[zerocool2k1]

I just bought a barebones amd 1600 athlon xp. I bought it with ide slot for the hard drive and one slot for floppy and one more ide drive(cdrom). The system original came with a 52x cdrom drive. And i just bought a sony cdrw that I installed into the second drive bay. I tried to connect both the cdrom and cdrw at the same time but my system doesnt seem to recognize either drive. But when I just connect one drive either the cdrom or cdrw it would recognize. I only have that one free ide slot to my motherboard. How do i connect both drives to work at the same time. Is it possible to connect two drives using a single cable that plugs into both drives and then connects to the motherboard slot. Any help would be appreciated.

[bunyip]

Your motherboard should have two IDE connectors IDE0 & IDE1.

Yes you can run two drives off each connector giving you up to 4 drives (HDD, CD/DVD).
The floppy drives run off a separate motherboard connection so they are not included in the 4 possible IDE drives.

When connecting two drives to the one IDE cable you must make one the 'Master' drive and the other must be the 'Slave'. (If you have two masters or two slaves the system will not be able to configure the drives).

Your two CD drives are probably both set as masters by default. Change one of them to a 'slave' and connect them both to the same cable.

Changing a drive to a slave or master is done by moving a small connector at the back of the drive adjacent to where the IDE cable plugs in. The connector settings should be printed on the drive, usually on the top.

The pins at back that you need to change will be labelled like this ..
C M S
S A L

you need to move the connector on one drive from under the MA to SL.

Hope that helps.