Maybe the cable was upside down so it was incorrectly inserted to drive (should not be possible though)?
Is it even IDE drive, maybe something else?

But otherwise, when there are two drives on IDE cable, one must be master and other must be slave, order is not important. Sometimes for things to work, the master needs to be set to "master, with slave present" on older drives.

When there is only one device, it does not really matter if it is slave or master.

So a few things to begin. It would be best if you explicitly mention the model of the motherboard, model of the drive, and any other devices on that or other IDE cables.

It could be as simple as position on the cable, like middle instead of end. It also could be cable orientation if the connector is not keyed to only go in one way.

fitzpatr wrote:

So a few things to begin. It would be best if you explicitly mention the model of the motherboard, model of the drive, and any other devices on that or other IDE cables.

Edited in original post now. Kind of important!

Jepael wrote:

Maybe the cable was upside down so it was incorrectly inserted to drive (should not be possible though)?
Is it even IDE drive, maybe something else?

But otherwise, when there are two drives on IDE cable, one must be master and other must be slave, order is not important. Sometimes for things to work, the master needs to be set to "master, with slave present" on older drives.

The CD drive states "IDE Interface" on it, and simply has 3 sets of pins labelled "cable select," "slave," and "master," while the HDD has "One Drive Only," "Drive Is Slave," "Drive Is Master Slave is Present," and "Cable Select." The first and third both show the same pattern.

PS- what does "cable select" mean?

"cable select" was intended to let devices automatically determine the correct master/slave setting based on their position on the cable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - I seldom used it. IDE gets two devices per port, and I've gotta futz with the jumpers anyway, so I might as well just set master and slave manually rather than trusting a witchety autodetection scheme that doesn't work half the time anyway.

Sounds to me like you want the HDD set to "Master with Slave Present" and the CD set to "Slave", and make sure the cable is connected the right way around. Even if the shell isn't keyed, and there's no key pin, Pin 1 should be marked. If that still won't chooch, your CD drive might be roached - try it somewhere else and see if it works.

SOLVED IT! Turned out that the last person switched the jumper on the HDD around. The jumper was double sided, and someone used the wrong end. Everything works now!