A friend put in an extra hard drive for me a while ago to hold the thousands of media files on my computer

Since this, the computer has not detected either of my CD drives

When i start it up, I get a message something along the lines of "S.M.A.R.T capable but disabled"

Anyone able to tell me how to start using my cd drives again?

PS - I do have some (extremely) limited knowledge of how to open up my PC, and what is what inside etc., but if you tell me to try switching cables around, please tell me what they look like!

I believe I've seen this post in another forum on suggestafix but I'll answer here. The message your getting is about S.M.A.R.T. SMART is an acronym which stands for Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology and is used to warn users about potential hardware failure before the data on the drive is completely corrupt. It does this by comparing spin-up times, numbers of bad sectors, average seek time and other small statistics. When it detects a drastic change over a short period of time, this is a sign the drive may be failing.

The warning that your receiving is just that SMART is disabled for one of the drives. This in and of itself is nothing to pull your hair out over. It does not mean there's a hardware failure.

As for your cd-roms not working, if you open the PC case you'll see two flat cables that are plugged into your hard drives and cd-rom(s). These are IDE cables. Next to where the flat IDE cables connect to your cd-rom should be a small block of metal pins with a "jumper" or plastic clip covering two of the pins. This is called a jumper setting.

The jumper setting tells the computer which drive on the IDE cable (there can be 2 drives on a cable) is the master drive and which is the slave. Most CD-Roms are labelled as to which pins are which, this may be a label on the top of the drive, or it may be etched right into the back of the drive itself.

Examine the jumper settings of the devices on the IDE cable that contains your CD-Rom, one should be set to master and one set to slave. Do not change the jumper settings of the devices on the same IDE cable as the original hard drive in your system, this may cause the system not to boot.

If you can get this far, just take a look, and report back how your computer is layed out?

What else is on the same cable as your CD-Rom? A Hard Drive, another CD-Rom, or nothing?

Are both of your hard drives on the same cable?

When your computer starts to boot and you see the smart disabled error, do you see it checking for all of the following?:

Primary Master
Primary Slave
Secondary Master
Secondary Slave



EDIT: REPLY WAS MOVED TO 'Hardware And Multimedia Problems' because of duplicate post

By Lorraine