i put in a new IDE cable (yes, blue end attached to motherboard) and i got errors regarding "ElbyCheck detected corrupt Filter Driver..." and then my PC detected no Optical drives at all (!!).
so i replaced my old IDE cable and now at least i have my DVD+RW drive working and the old DVD-ROM just taking up space. is there any way i can "force" my system to recognize this old DVD-ROM drive? in BIOS i have it set to "auto detect" now, but i saw i can choose "CD-ROM" drive. what if i did that?
also, how exactly does Win XP interact with optical drives? when i bought this new DVD+RW drive, there was no driver to install, so i assume WinXP reads some info from the drives firmware (which i did update to ES0G). i checked the driver in the Hardware Profile and it says it's a Windows driver 5.1.2535.0. i guess this is some default driver Windows makes for optical drives?
if all else fails and the LDW-401s refuses to "play well with others" then i just may remove my old DVD-ROM drive since i don't really need it now anyway (altho it would be nice to have 2 DVD drives set to read different Region Codes).
once again, any comments or feedback is welcome...thanks...