Problems installing an old CD drive in a HP Brio

Factual Questions
1

I’m a complete amateur in installing computer hardware, so I’m completely out of my league. I can install things, but get lost troubleshooting.

I’m trying to install an old (by old, I mean circa 1997) CD drive into a HP Brio for my folks this holiday. For the sake of arguement, the CD drive itself is sound and I want to try and keep it (yes, I know that it’ll be better to buy a new one). When I install it, the drive doesn’t respond or open and Win98 hangs during startup. I think I’ve connected the power and serial cord correctly - there were only one of each plug. The stupid computer has a 120W power supply, and runs a Celeron 266MHz Pentium with onboard graphics and sound.

The strange thing is that the computer originally had a CD drive that worked perfectly well. So is it the CD drive, an underpowered powersupply or the computer? Do new CD drives consume more power than the older ones?

2

120 watts sounds a bit on the lean side for a 266 MHz machine. It could be the drive is just putting the total power draw over the limit. Also, make sure you’ve got the data cable plugged in correctly, and that is is jumpered as a slave IDE drive and the hard drive is jumpered as master with slave. The red stripe on the data cable should be next to Pin 1 on the drive connector. For all IDE drives (that I’ve encountered), Pin1 is the one closest to the power connector.

3

Aww nuts. Thanks for reminding me about the jumpers Q.E.D..