BIOS Updates forum

Hello.

I would appreciate it if somebody could tell me why the following occurs and whether a BIOS upgrade from esupport could possibly fix the problem.

I have an Acer Aspire 1705SMi with latest BIOS 3C13.

According to the manual, because of some unspecified design considerations, it uses the primary IDE channel for CD/DVD and the secondary for the hard disk.

Its original Matshita DVD-RA UJ-811 broke down so I took it to the store and had them put in a new NEC AD-7543.

Now the BIOS sees the hard disk but under ATAPI devices it shows nothing.

WinXP SP2 sees the drive but puts it under "unknown devices" and claims it has no driver for it.

The question:

Is that something that could be fixed with a modified BIOS or is the new DVD drive beyond the specs of the laptop and that's why it ignores it?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Sounds more like it is malfunctioning or not properly fitted. I'd go back to the shop and have them correct the matter.

Thank you for the response.

Mulfunction of the laptop or the DVD drive?

The DVD drive is brand-new and the laptop used to work with the previous drive.

Whatever the case, would XP be able to see the drive if it anything was mulfunctioning?
It even identifies the device's name/model but it just doesn't know what type of device it is.

I found out the problem but no fix yet.

This Acer likes to keep the DVD on the primary IDE channel and the hard disk on the secondary.
From the looks of it, it also wants the DVD to be the secondary master.

The new NEC drive comes as primary master from the factory so there's a conflict there.

NEC supplies two small utilities to set the drive to normal ATA or to reverse ATA (for machines like my Acer).

The utilities run from the laptop if the drive is visible (mine is not), or they run on another desktop and access the drive through an IDE to "JAE KX15-50ELD1L" adapter.

Unfortunately neither the store not the local NEC support had this adapter. A search on the net didn't come up with any vendors either.

Unless you know of a source for this adapter, do you think that this problem could be fixed with a modified BIOS from eSupport or similar?
Is the option to force a device to slave mode controllable in BIOS or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks.

I have had a similar problem with putting a CD-RW/DVD combo drive into a Toshiba laptop. My solution was to put the drive into another (Fujitsu-Siemens) laptop that could see the drive, and run the utility there.

The laptop drive should have a standard interface and you should be able to find an IDE-to-laptop adaptor cheaply; here is one in the USA; postage probably costs more than the hardware.