So I finally have all of my parts to boot this bad boy up and start installing the OS. What I am having trouble with is getting the Bios to recognize my slim DVD-ROM drive.

I don't even think I am getting power to the DVD-ROM. I figure I either have it hooked up wrong (using slim dvd to ide adapter) or the drive is fallty. Of the few folks that have set their Auto PC up, can you provide any advice? How did you set things up, hard drive on Primary master and DVD-ROM/CD-ROM on secondary slave?

Thanks,
Scott

 

I believe mine is primary master for HD and secondary master for DVD. If there are jumpers, just put them on cable select. I didn't really mess with mine it picked them up fine.

The cables they supply are not long enough to hook both as primary.

If you can open the DVD drive door, you are getting power to the DVD drive. The adapter is kinda tricky....make sure you have a good connection. If I remember right, the adapter screws into the DVD drive. The power connector goes underneath the IDE cable on my particular adapter.

 

just curious, but where did you guys get the adaptor from? local stores have em?

and I would suggest master primary and secondary, for hard drive and cdrom respectivly.

for troubleshooting, try plugging the drive into the computer your on now, see if it works, that will rule out the drive being bad, then try the drive in your computer right here, in the car PC, that will rull out the motherboard or somthing, then your left with specific driver setup on car computer, or the adaptor.

I know one thing for sure, your gonna hit yourself when you figure it out, itll be that easy, thats just how these damn computers are.

 

Thanks for the advice. Yeah, I have built numerous PC's and no matter how many times I do it I always find something each time that I get hung on. I think my issue is getting it connected properly because the DVD drive is not powering up. Ares, good idea on testing it on a diff pc.

As for the adapter, you can find it at several places on the Internet, just do a search on "Slim DVD-ROM IDE", that should get you to some. I think I got mine from Idot.com

 

awesome will do.

and for ideas of your own... I found this guy

http://www.unc.edu/~inorkuo/g35/

he spent a bunch, but has some great features in there, Im thinking the voice controled system with dragon ware would be nice... he also went another route on getting into the radio. not a bad idea, I know I never use the tape player anyway... anyway, just thought Id post this, I donno where to post things I find theres like 5 threads on the autoPC at this point...