Is it possible to hook up a CD, DVD, and DVDRW on a computer? (1 Viewer)

[Rob Varto]

I know this is probably a stupid question, but how would I install a CD, DVD and DVDRW in a computer? Standard ribbons only have enough connections for two of these three components and I want all three. Can anyone help me out?

 

[Bill Slack]

if they're all IDE, by default, most will support 4 anyway (2 channels, so you could have 3 + 1 HDD. If you need more than 4 total, you can just buy another IDE controller. You could also get an external drive (USB2.0 or Firewire, for instance.)

Not sure why you'd need all 3, but it'd be easy/cheap enough to get it to work.

 

[Kelvin Tucker]

It really depends on your computer. For example, Bill's point is that MOST PC's will have two places to plug in IDE cables. And, as you stated, you have two connections on each cable. So 2x2=4 devices.

However, before you rush out and buy that cable there are other considerations.
1) Some machines only have a single IDE controller, so 1 cable x 2 connections = 2 devices (1 disk + ...)
2) Other machines (like mine) have 2 standard IDE (4 devices) + 2 RAID IDE (4 more devices)

You need to look at your case, and see if you have a place to mount all three. Then you can look at your motherboard and see if there are two IDE slots.

 

[Chris]

You can get an ATA PCI controller (like a Promise TX2)

Or, flip your HDDs to SATA then you'll have four possibilities for burners

I'm currently running 5 HDDs, 2 DVD-RW drives, 1 CDRW drive.. with not a lot of difficulty

(outside of power supply hunger)

 

[Rob Gillespie]

I've tried running optical drives on a Promise controller card before. Always seemst to introduce more problems than it solves.

Rob, you really need to consider wether you really need that CD rom drive. Both the DVD rom and writer can do the same thing.

 

[Rob Varto]

Thanks you guys. I know it sounds weird why I would want the CD, but when I tried to "reinstall" Win XP on my old cpu a couple of months back, I could NOT get the XP disk recognized by my DVD. When I sought help on this forum, someone pointed out that you MUST use a CD to reinstall XP. As crazy as that sounded, it worked. I don't want to have to swap out a CD every year just to refresh my system.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

That's not the case. If the drive can't read the disc but another can, then the drive is at fault.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Rob Varto, that was me that said that. Don't know if it is the DVD drive or the bios/mthbd, but some machines will not boot with just DVD drives.

What I did to 'fix' this is to load up WIN-ME on another drive that I can boot from (I just don't use it unless XP crashes).

Glenn

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

I installed XP on my computer using a DVD-ROM drive.

 

[Citizen87645]

Me too.