Solved Problems installing 2 Asus 24B1ST j DRWs in a Dell 780

[OkieGentleman]

I acquired a Dell 780 and upgraded it with the latest Bio upgrade (15A), a Samsung EVO 250GB SSD, an additional ASUS 24B1ST j Read/Write DVD unit, 16 GB of memory, the original 250GB HHD, the orginal DELL DVD and a GeForce GT 610 2 GB video card. I am happy with what I put together. I will say I have approximately $300 in this rig using an existing monitor.

After I upgraded, a family member wanted me to do the same for her as her computer was an old HP that had quit. I built her the same set up on a Dell 780 except she only has 8 GB of memory and the photo card unit that handles 4 types of memory card. During the upgrade I installed 2 ASUS 24B1ST units. The computer will only see one of the ASUS units. I have swapped cords, tried to load the latest drivers (the system says I have the latest drivers for a DVD read write unit) and have swapped the HHDs and DVD to each of the 4 SATA connections in various combinations. I finally determined that the lowest number SATA connection with an ASUS unit was recognized, the the system would see it and it would reject the second as unknown and pop up with the information that a drive had failed. It did not matter what order or combination I set the units into the SATA connections, when the board came to the second ASUS DRW unit it rejected it.

During this build I upgraded her OS to Windows 10 Hoping that the problems would go away. The problem persisted.

I finally semi fixed the problem by pulling out two older DRW units from a Dell 780,the units are 16X speed. The units are as follows

DELL HL-DT-ST DVD +- RWGH 50N ATA
DELL OPTIARC DVD=RW AD-7250H ATA
the driver is located at C:\Windows\system32\cdrom.sys
driver is file version 10.0.10586.0 (th2-release 151029-1700)

Her system seems to work fine with this arrangement and I may leave it like it is presently running.

My Dell 780 uses windows 7 ( I will wait to upgrade to 10) and it does exactly the same thing as far as rejecting two identical Asus DRW 24s. I finally got two DRW units installed by using a used DELL unit that I had on hand.
I have installed a ASUS DRW- 24B1ST j and a Dell PLDS-DVD-ROM DH-16D5S, using driver 6.1.7600.116385 (win7-rtm 090713-1255). This is working fine at this time.

My question is has anyone run into this type of problem before and what did you do about it.

I will say that I am a retired old bugger that started on computers before MicroSoft existed and I have scratch built several computers over the years. I just hate it when something like this pops up and it becomes an problem I need to solve.

Any and all assistance will be appreciated and I Thank You in advance for your input.

 

[Mellon Head]

Do you actually need to have two optical drives? Most people just get by with one, if any at all.

The ASUS drives may have the same hardware address, and that is why one is failing. They are probably expecting to be the only optical drive in the system.

 

[OkieGentleman]

Thanks for the reply Mellon Head

I kind of thought of that but saw no way of changing the address. I do not know if the address could be changed with a software change. Two units lets me copy photos and such. I have scanned several family albums and made them into movies with a slide show and music. Two units lets me duplicate my work for family members.

 

[Mellon Head]

I see why you need two now, though you could do the same thing by creating ISO files on your movies/pictures, etc. and burning them onto a single disk burner.

The way I see it there has to be an address thing inside the ASUS units, and it's very unlikely that you can change it. Older CD/DVD drives used to have a master/slave jumper, but those were for the old IDE units.

Sad to say, I think you're stuck with the setup that you have going right now.

 

[OkieGentleman]

I hoping that one of the youngsters (I'm 71) out there had fiddled with the software for the Asus on the other hand I wonder if I bought an LG brand or some other that would solve my problem.

 

[OkieGentleman]

Follow up.. I installed a ASUS 24B1ST j Read/Write DVD unit and left the DELL OPTIARC DVD=RW AD-7250H ATA. As these are two different DRW units the system recognizes both of the and seems to be chugging along nicely. I have turned the upgraded computer over to the lady and she is tickled to death with its picture clarity and speed of operation.

Thank You to all that looked at my problem and Thank You Mellon Head for your input.

 

[Mellon Head]

Glad you got it working.