So i have my first hard drive connected through sata cables to my mother board. And on my ribbon cable from the mother board i just have a dvd rom connected to it. and when i add the new hard drive to the slave spot on the ribbon cable and start up my computer and go to BIOS i can see the new hard drive but when i start windows i am unable to see the hard drive and also i cannot see my dvd drive as well.

Any suggestions?

welcome to bleeping

set the hard drive jumper to slave

it's not really a good idea to have a dvd drive and a hard drive share a cable

Is there anything else that i can hook my dvd drive up to, beacuse my mother board only has one IDE slot, the rest are SATA. or would it be less hassle to just pick up a SATA harddrive and use that instead?
Oh and thank you for welcoming me

I would use a sata hard drive

and new hard drives need to be initialized and formatted with disk management

You could always use a controller card (as I do) to utilize any other PATA/IDE hard drives with that motherboard (if you have more).

Louis

controller card? how? i haven't tried

http://www.newegg.com/

A controller card (either PATA or SATA...or combined) allows a user to use hard drives or optical drives which cannot be accommodated by the original setup of the motherboard. It fits into one of the PCI slots which are on the motherboard and it functions to give the user additional connection options which cannot be obtained on the motherboard.

For example...I also have a motherboard with 1 IDE slot and 2 SATA slots on the motherboard. I have a ton of PATA/IDE drives which still function correctly...and I want to use them. I also have 4 SATA hard drives that I also may want to use.

Sooo...I purchased a controller card whic provides me with additional IDE (1) and SATA (2) connectors, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16816102061

I now have the capability of connecting 8 SATA devices and 4 IDE devices on this system.

Louis