First post, by superkato1k
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- Newbie
I'm really stumped on this one. Maybe I'm doing something very simple wrong, so thought to put it past you all.
I have a functional Pentium 3 on a Supermicro P6SBA slot 1 motherboard. It's been running like a champ, with a CD drive and 2 hard drives. I thought it would be nice to replace the CD drive with a DVD, so I bought an IDE DVD-RW drive (a Samsung TS-H492 from 2008). I swapped out the CD for the DVD and all of a sudden BIOS fails to recognize any of the hard drives (from two separate controllers) and goes into boot failure. I disconnect the DVD drive and voila, BIOS is back to normal, all drives are recognized, and Windows (98) starts.
I've used every possible jumper combination and every possible Master-Slave combination on both IDE controllers and the same thing happens every time. Does this sound like a dead DVD drive? Is it possible my motherboard is freaking out at a DVD? It seems odd as DVDs were definitely a thing in 98-99 (I think the BIOS is dated 99). There are no jumpers on the mobo that should bear on this problem.
Should I chalk this up as a bad DVD drive? I'm prepared to do that, but the really weird BIOS behavior has me wondering as well.
Thoughts? And thanks. 😀