really slow to access CD ddrives

halloo!! this is an odd problem, with what i hope will be an easy fix, i have a K62 500, with a SOYO 5EMA+ MB (newest bios) and its running win98, with a 40gig WD on the primary, and a iomega zipCD slave on the secodary with a creative 32x master. my problem is that anytime i start up explorer or try to access the CD, its is excessivly slow, to the point of about 2 minutes to jsut read the CD, and anytime after htat, when i try to work in explorer on my HD, then the file access(normally lightning) is sooooooo sloow. i need help here please

Have you installed the ETEQ 4-in-1 drivers for that Soyo motherboard? If not, just it a try, they're on yer mb CD - or you can get em off the net (which is probably quicker for you).

If that doesn't work, try removing one of yer drives on the secondary channel and see what happens to the other one. It's possible that one of your drives (32x or the zipcd) has something wrong with it and is ruining access for the whole channel....

PS - Soyo's webiste is www.soyo.com.tw

Milenko has a good point, one of the devices may be configured incorrectly thus causing a problem. I just installed a CD-RW on this system & ran into problems. What I did to resolve them was this;

1) Remove all IDE devices with the exception of the primary Boot drive (Master on the Primary.) Make sure your jumper settings are correct on the hard drive. In my case if I jumpered it to "Master" and there was no slave present, it would not boot. I had to jumper it for "only device" (no jumper) to make it work. Go into the bios, if necessary to reconfigure the drives. Boot into Windows & make sure all is well. (Test drive access speed)

2) Connect the Slave on the Primary. You may have to re-jumper the hard drive for master with slave present.

******* I would check the recommended installation instructions that probably came with the CD-RW drive. In most cases it is best to have the CD-RW as Master on the Secondary, with the other CD-ROM slave on the primary. For "on-the-fly" recording, it is best NOT to have both CD drives on the same channel. ********

Again, go into the BIOS, if necessary to re-detect the drives. Boot into Windows & verify drive access times for both devices.

3) Add the third device, following the same procedures listed above.

4) Add the fourth device, if present.

Following this procedure will let you isolate the problem.

thing with the setup is when i am burning CD to CD, i have never, ever written a coaster, so that setup part of it works, and i dont want to slow down my HD access, ill try the jumpers and whatnot tho, thanx

I had a problem similar to this. My CD Burner of all things was having trouble reading burned cd's. Wrote to them just fine but had a LOT of trouble reading burned cd's and some trouble reading regular cd's. I finally chalked it up to my IDE connector going bad. I added it to my primary chain along with the primary hard drive and it read cd's just perfect. After that, I had an excuse to go buy an ATA100 card :D I'd connect another cd rom to the same chain to see if you have similar problems.

99% of the time slow hard drive is caused by the following:

1. You have a newer hard drive that has dma enabled, but you are using a 40-conductor cable instead of an 80-conductor cable.

2. The cable or controller itself is bad.

3. You have an IRQ conflict with the the IDE controller (very rare).

It's almost always that you are not using an 80-conductor cable with a new drive. If this is the case, either disable dma or replace the cable. I've seen this happen a few times and it will even cause windows to load up very slowly and will also cause data corruption due to signal loss.

Often CDROM drives don't work correctly in UDMA mode. The solution is to disable UDMA(in BIOS) on the IDE channel with the CDROM drive. The CDROM drive will then be accessed through PIO mode.