Two CD drives on win98 - possible?

The secondary master should work just fine. The secondary slave I would change to primary slave. I had this up and running no problem with a Teac 60x and an old 2x I can't remember the name of!! Also make sure of two things.
1) Watch for IRQ conflicts. If you do have them, you should be able to manually configure the IRQs in Device Manager.
2) Don't install a CD-ROM drive too close to a hard drive. I had a problem with his before. It turns out that hard drives produce a magnetic field that will make the CD-Rom drive stop reading. It will look as though the device is working properly but it most assuredly won't.
Other than, of course, try not to bend the pins on the drive(s), it should work just fine.

Have Fun!!

Yeap set up one Cd rom as Master, and the next one as Slave, You can do this by changing the Jumpers on the back of the Cd-rom also make sure you have a cable Eide cable with 2 ports dont put the cd-rom near the Hd, a fwe things to watch out for is IRQ conflicts, shouldnt happen if you install drivers first, and set it up right, also make sure that the Red line is on the first pin Or you wont be able to read anything,

Hope it helps

This is how i Setup my Cd-rw
1. Installed Drivers
2 Rebooted
3. Installed Cd-rw
4 Brought System back up
5. System Picked up Cd-rw
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Make sure the Cd-rw is not on the Same cable as the Hd, It wont work right
Try to switch the cable ends, Ie: whats in the Cdroms to the board,
Hope this one helps a bit better,

Unless I'm blind, I don't think anyone has suggested checking your BIOS, to ensure that both CDs are recognised at the hardware level.
Next, have you connected your slave CD (whichever that is)to the middle connector of your IDE cable, and the Master CD at the end, furthest away from the m/board?

If this doesn't help, try going back to basics. Connect only the Kenwood CD (set to Master. Does it work?
Hopefully the answer is yes.
Now remove the Kenwood, set the Teac to Master and connectup. Does it work? If the answer is yes again, then you don't have a problem with the drives.
At this stage, reset one of the CDs to Slave, connect to the middle connector on the cable, set the other CD as Master & connect to one end, and plug back in the m/board. Now does it work? If not, recheck the connection, partucularly at the m/board. It is easy to get the pins mixed up and think you're connecting up pin1 when in fact it's 26 (I know, I have done this myself).
If you are still having problems, then it's a new one on me. I have two CDs (a Sony CDR & Yamaha CD/RW) running Win98, so I know it works.
Soory I can't be more help than this.

Roger

I like Roger's answer but just wanted to point out that a standard IDE cable has all wires in parallel to the same pins on each connector so whether the slave is connected to the middle or one of the ends shouldn't matter. (unlike the old floppy cables with the twist in the middle between A and B).
Polarity matters, but not position.

But I think his answer overall was likely to get you to where you need to be.

paul

My suggestion is to install your hard disk and one cd as mater slave on primary controller and the other cd on the secondary controller as master. the irq isnt even a question cdroms are handled under the dual hard disk controllers?I have never seen a cdrom use an irq!! This will work for you!

Position on the ribbon cable does not matter.
Position on primary/secondary does not matter
It may slow your system but it still should work. IRQ's is a non-issue. I agree with the one person who said to check the BIOS. If you have an auto setting, set it there. Try running msinfo32.exe, go to components/storage/drives and see if they are there.

What you have is an internal hardware conflict. Windows recognize the cd drives and will not report an error, because it is has resources available for both of them. The problem is the 2 CD drives are not talking to each other to determine which is slave/master, they both want to be the boss. Some how you have to force the issue, manually configure the jumpers for both slave and master, putting the master at the end of the cable. Keep in mind that some manufactures will not allow there equipment to be mixed with others, no matter how they are configured. Oh, by the way the kenwood product literature web page says they are using an inovative technology available only from Kenwood, which might mean that it can only communicate with only there CD models.

Beowulf,
I doubt if the problem is hardware or master/slave configuration, but there are some CD's that balk at being configured as Master, so try swapping the master/slave configuration on the two drives. Although performance may suffer, try setting one drive up as the primary slave with your HD. IF this resolves your problem, then it for certain is not any IRQ or resource conflict with Windows.
Most likely your problem is software.
If you are using the Adaptec EZ CD Creator Deluxe software, be aware that there is a bug in that S/w that causes the drive to not be recognized. The basic version of EZ CD Creator does not suffer from this problem.

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