I have some Dell stadalone PCs to look after (optiplex P4 1Ghz)

I have had some bizarre CD Rom issues and I was wondering if anyone could shed any light (my first Dell PC dealings)

1. I replaced a broken CD Rom with one I had lying in my spares cupboard (original one is Samsung spare was Benq)

2. I booted up the PC and went into windows no probs

3. Installed the relevant drivers automatically it then needed rebooting

4. Upon reboot it says there is no boot disc available??

5. I unplugged the cdrom IDE cable and rebooted again the system booted

up

6. Unplugged the cdrom IDE cable and rebooted windows booted??

Ok I thought that's weird so I plugged back in the old cdrom

and it booted up fine again??

7. I tried another cdrom drive (forget the make) exact same thing wouldn't boot??

I scratched my head for a bit and had another rummage in my spares cupboard and I found another smasung drive this was cd writer.

I plugged this in and it booted fine, installed the drivers no probs, rebooted and worked!!!!!

Are Dell pcs fussy about what cdrom drives go in them?? There isn't any crazy programming in the firmware or anything is there?? As the BIOS would not recognise any cd rom other than a smasung one???

All help is appreciated as I need spares and I don't want to buy the wrong drives lol.

Can't give any specific advice, but my experience of the few remaining Dells in our office is that they can be a bit funny like that. Don't know why or how, but when bits have broken like LAN cards, they can be a right pain compatibility-wise. I suspect you may well need to get a Samsung CD-ROM just to keep the blinking thing happy.

I'll be so glad when our new PCs come and I can finally bin the last of our Dells!

IIRC the Dell ones use cable select whereas most CDROM drives are set up as either master or slave, not cable select.

Check out what the original drive was set to and set the replacement one the same, should be fine then

Checked all that in my inital setting up lol. It's a weird one that's for sure.