[mythtv-users] no DVD drive found? SOLVED

[Greg Woods]

Unclear what really fixed the problem, but I opened up the box. Remember
the story about the proverbial car where you had to pull the engine to
change the headlight bulb? That's what computer cases are like for me.
To remove the hard drive to check jumper settings, I had to pull the
memory chips. To get the DVD drive out, I had to pull the power supply
(but fortunately could avoid having to disconnect all the power cables).
Once I did that, the jumpers were correct: the DVD drive was jumpered as
slave, the hard drive as master. The only odd thing was that the blue
end of the IDE cable was plugged into the DVD drive and the black end
into the motherboard. The blue color of the motherboard connector
suggests that this is backwards.

What I ended up doing was mounting the hard drive in the top section of
the bay closer to the DVD drive (which required a mounting bracket that
I happened to have). This is probably why the cable was "backward" to
begin with; before I moved it, the hard drive was too far away from the
DVD drive for the cable to be plugged in "forward". After moving it, it
would fit the "right" way.

At any rate, after spending an entire evening doing all this, the DVD
drive now works! And my very first attempt to play a DVD from within
Mythtv also worked. Haven't tried to rip any DVD's yet, the hardware
work took all the time I had.

I wasn't the one who built this box, so my ego won't be insulted here.
But does it really matter which end of the IDE cable is connected to the
motherboard? Aren't they just straight-through cables? Maybe the reason
the problem is fixed is that something wasn't quite seated right?
Although I tried reseating the cable connections before I actually
pulled any drives and it didn't help.

--Greg