Secondary IDE controller disabled (no CD Rom)

[paulpingpong]

Last week I installed Verizon DSL. In the process of making the modem work, I have lost the CD rom drive as well as the 2nd hard drive (which is for data backup). The property of the secondary IDE controller now says it's dynamically disabled, which is what the property of the CD Rom says is wrong.  The driver is reinstalled but does not help.  What do I need to do?  Computer is an eMachine 500 Celeron, Win 98 SE.

[Dell4700]

Do you have a dynamic drive overlay or BIOS overlay program installed on your system?  If so, it needs to be reinstalled.

If you don't know, give us some information about your drives (model, size, formatting).

Dell

[originalposter]

Never heard of those things mentioned. The 2nd hard drive is a Western Digital in a removable rack.  The CD drive is a CDRW from IO magic, I think.  There are on the same cable.  I wonder if "dynamically disabled" means that the connections are loose. I will reinsert the connectors later and see if helps.

[Dell4700]

Dynamically disabled means your drive(s) at some level are recognized, but are not functional.  This may be caused by...

-  the wrong, bad or misconfigured cables - UDMA33 vs UDMA66 vs UDMA100 cable mismatches, etc.

-  incompatibilities between the drives

-  misconfigured drive or IDE settings

-  inadequate or problem power supply - with auto-insert turned on, windows will poll your drive every 4 seconds and it's usually the last polled device.  If power is inadequate or not available, you will get a message.

Dell

[paulpingpong]

Since the 2 drives have been working for years, remaining possibilities are the cable's gone bad; settings have been changed when I was installing the DSL modem & router; also I added the free Zone Alarm firewall.  One of these may be the culprit.  I will try eliminating them one by one and see.