Pioneer 110 not recognized on Dell Optiplex GX-620

[SCDVD]

A friend of mine recently bought a Dell Optiplex GX-620 and it doesn't recognize his Pioneer 110 burner. Any suggestions?

[The_Pioneer]

(ADDED AFTER WRITING WHAT'S BELOW - If the drive doesn't eject with a power cable plugged in the back, it's dead)

My first thought is this - your friend has connected the IDE cable with the Pioneer burner, to the secondary IDE port on the motherboard. Under normal circumstances, this would still result in the drive appearing BUT if the secondary IDE controller was disabled in the BIOS then... might as well connect the the cable to a daffodill - it won't be any less effective.

Here what you tell your friend (I'm assuming a lowish level of tech-familiarity on his part, apologies if wrong):

Restart the PC (or just start it).

Watch to see if the burner is recognised at bootup, when the PC will autodetect IDE drives attached to the motherboard's IDE connectors.

If no, restart the PC from windows.

Enter the bios setup, usually by pressing DEL but on an Optiplex, I think it's F2.

There may be a category on the BIOS menu titled 'INTEGRATED PERIPHERALS SETUP' (think I'm wrong but going through every menu isn't going to take time). You are looking for two options. The first concerns whether or not the PRIMARY, SECONDARY or BOTH ide controllers are enabled. Even if both are enabled here, the secondary controller may be disabled in another menu.

Once everything is definitely enabled, find the menu that shows the autodetected IDE drives connected to the PC. By moving to the secondary IDE option, ensure this is set to AUTO. It may be possible to press enter and autodetect any drives on the SECONDARY ide controller.

Hope this makes some sense. A little more information in the question (such as 'It's not recognised by the BIOS or on startup') wouldn't go amiss. If you try the advice above and still have no success, consider suggesting he check the JUMPER setting on the back of the drive.

[SCDVD]

Thanks The_Pioneer. I just spoke to my friend. He had manged to get his drive to be recognized by his system by installing it on the secondary IDE channel. He says for some reason, he couldn't get it to be recognized on the primary IDE channel. (It wasn't a master/slave problem). I explained to him that was a better way to install it in any case. His hard disc shouldn't be on the same channel as his Pioneer 110.

[ROF]

With the addition of the Pioneer 110 to any stock configured gx620 your friend has doubled the street value of that PC.

[The_Pioneer]

All's well that...

[wulf109]

I recently installed a Pioneer 110 and my computer wouldn't recognize it until I changed my secondary IDE from an ATA33 to an ATA66+ ribbon connector.
The 110 is ATA66 or better and seems to require an ATA66+ cable.
WinXP sees it as DMA4,not as DMA2 as most drives show.