"optical drives set to slave"? I don't ever recall any setting on optical drive. Until you get this thing going, why not disable the cd drive right now (you don't need it now).
Primary ide for the OS harddrive always.
You cannot get past the BIOS, what does that mean? Little more details.
My motherboard bit the dust a few months ago due to bad caps. Thanks to generous forum members here and many Carey Holzman YouTube videos, I'm closer than ever to having a functioning desktop PC. But I cannot get past the BIOS and into Windows XP. This may be happening because I am still fuzzy on how to setup IDE drives.
Here is my current configuration:
One IDE-based DVD RW drive
One IDE-based CD-Rom drive
One floppy drive
One 250 GB IDE-based hard disk drive
An 80-wire ribbon cable ties the hard drive to the motherboard's primary IDE connector. I have the blue end of the cable plugged into the motherboard and the black end plugged into the hard drive. Both optical drives are using a 40-wire cable plugged into the motherboard's secondary IDE connector. My DVD drive is at the very end of that cable while the CD-Rom is in the middle. I'm using a third ribbon cable to connect my floppy drive to the motherboard's floppy disk drive connector. It has no middle plug like the others. Jumpers for both optical drives are set to slave, while the hard drive jumper is set to master. The floppy drive doesn't seem to have a jumper.
Do you see any problems with my setup? Are optical drives always set as slaves? If you only have one hard drive, should it be set as a master? Do hard drives always utilize the 80-wire ribbon cable? Do optical drives always use the 40-wire version? What about a motherboard's primary IDE connector versus secondary IDE connector?
I know modern computer systems don't tend to use IDE technology anymore, but any insight you might have would be helpful. Thanks in advance!

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