As I was installing the DVD burner for *user* yesterday, I noticed there is only one IDE cable in that new PC. I'm thinking this is the second one I've run across like this. The one cable attaches to both the hard drive as well as the CD drive. The new DVD drives don't include their own IDE cable. A situation in the past that produced three cables is now presenting itself with only one cable. This is easily remedied by having an extra cable on hand, but only if the situation can be expected.

The CD drive was set to "slave" so I installed the DVD drive the same way. Since I am returning to finish another task on site, I plan to take an extra cable so that the DVD drive can be "master" on the second cable. I had to borrow the cable from her old PC to be able to attach her old hard drive in the new system to copy her data. The cable used only had a connector for one device. The PC refused to boot until the jumpers were changed from "master" to "slave" on the second hard drive.

We have a practice of installing DVD burners set to "master" as is listed on the instructions for this drive, but in the case of only one cable this setting can not be used. Luckily, this PC is here in town and can be corrected easily. I just felt everyone should be aware and be able to plan for this type of configuration conflict.