BIOS doesn't recognise drive but Windows does!

February 9, 2008 2:23 PM

Trying to install a new optical drive in an old laptop. Windows recognises it, but the BIOS does not!

Mitac 7321 aka Time Evesham Novatech Pico Packard Bell & many more...

I'm attempting to replace a non-working CD drive with a new DVD-ROM drive. When I reboot, the device is showing up as IDE device number 2 (after the hard drive) and it says it's disabled.

However when I get into Windows, the drive shows up in My Computer and works fine!

Any ideas? I've not tried a BIOS update yet, but can't see it should be necessary.

posted by edbyford to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I don't understand the problem. You say it works fine in Windows, but you haven't explained where else you want it to work.
posted by winston at 2:35 PM on February 9, 2008

Are you sure the disabled refers to the device actually WORKING, or is it just referring to BOOTING FROM that DVD?
posted by Malor at 2:42 PM on February 9, 2008

I'm fairly certain Malor is on the right track.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 3:02 PM on February 9, 2008

Following the same line of inquiry as Malor, can you actually boot off that drive? If you can, I don't see an issue here. It you can't, that's probably something you want to fix, unless you are going to network deploy an operating system.
posted by tracert at 3:27 PM on February 9, 2008

Response by poster: I want to be able to boot from the drive, yes. And the BIOS is already set up to boot from the CD drive, but it obviously can't because it doesn't recognise it.
posted by edbyford at 4:28 PM on February 9, 2008

Try sticking it on a separate cable, and/or switching the jumper on the back of it between cable select/master/slave.
posted by alexei at 1:20 AM on February 10, 2008

Response by poster: As it is a laptop, there are no different cables or jumper settings I could use!
posted by edbyford at 1:23 AM on February 10, 2008

I don't know if this is at all helpful but I once had problems with the BIOS not recognicing a new harddrive, but which were recognised by various higher level software. Turns out I had power level issues.
posted by Catfry at 6:32 AM on February 10, 2008