It could be a bad cable, cable on upside down or the issue I ran into.
I had this one machine that I needed to update the CDRW and DVD drive firmwares, then I used 80 conductor IDE cables and the cable select setting. I'm sure other combos would work, but I don't use 40 conductor cables anymore.
Bob
I sold my perfectly working, almost brand new Samsung 40x cdrw to a friend and offered to install it into his pc.
I removed both of his previous optical drives (dvdrom and crdom) as he didn't want them anymore.
After chucking in the cdrw on the second ide as master (only other device was hdd on ide1) and turning on the pc, everything was go, but there was no beep or picture on the monitor. I also noticed the cdrw LED was flashing on and off.
I ejected the cdrw tray and the pc posted / monitor came on.
I closed the cd tray and the monitor went off and the pc stopped.
The monitor is not sharing the pcs psu.
Leaving the tray open I was able to boot to windows and then close it (win2k, all latest updates etc).
The pc is not even posting when the tray is closed - this has to be one of the most bizarre situations I've ever had troubleshoot.
Things I have tried:
Changing the ide cable
Changing between master and slave
Reseating the video card
Checked all bios settings
Using a different molex connector
Unplugging the cdrw (boots fine)
Things I plan to try:
putting one of the old optical drives back in, maybe at the same time as the cdrw
I believe the mobo is an Asus cuv4x running a celeron 533 or so.

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