ok. jephree, if you remember me I had the Toshiba laptop issues....well I took the hard drive out of my laptop and hooked it up to my desktop (I have a little 40 pin adapter) to pull some information from it, the same thing I did a week ago and it worked fine then. Well, this time when I did it I hooked it up to the second IDE cable from my mobo and when I did that I accidentally touched it to the side of my desktop and it turned off the computers power? after that it would not find the laptop HD from this setup...so I hooked the CD/DVD drive back up the way I had it and WTH??? it wont find the DVD drives at ALL. not in Bios or anything. The drive powers on and opens but does not operate.....

I tried another IDE cable and it did not work

I tried taking the CD/DVD drive and hooking it up to the slave cable coming from the Hard Drive on the computer and this works fine. I'm pretty sure I fried the actual 2nd "slot" on my mother board. Its an emachine. what can I do???

Do you see anything in the Device Manager:

IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers

+ Secondary IDE Channel?

yes, primary and secondary are both there

If you right click the Secondary and then click Properties is everything OK?

Perhaps try the troubleshooter.

It SAYS the device is working properly. Troubleshooter was no help. do you think the slot on the mobo itself is fried? What if I uninstall the IDE secondary from the device manager and reboot?

Appears to be a possibility. I would try to clear the CMOS. Turn off the power: remove the battery: short the JBAT jumper (if applicable)*.

After a few minutes reverse the above procedure and reboot.

*switch the jumper from 1|2 to 2|3

Trying to uninstall and reboot is a good try too.

Ok now you're speaking greek to me. I uninstalled from the device manager and rebooted, its back on the list but didnt appear to do anything

EDIT: I did a search. Ill try the battery trick out of the mobo for 20 mins and see what happens.

Clearing the CMOS would reset the BIOS to default settings essentially removing any stored settings.

You should see a flat disk battery on your motherboard. (Like a watch or camera battery).

With the power unplugged and with this battery removed for a few minutes the motherboard will lose all stored settings. When you put the battery back and re-power and reboot your BIOS should be set to default. You will have to set the time and any other settings that you may have changed along the way.

Some motherboards also have a 3 pin jumper block very close to the battery and it is usually marked JBAT. If this is there you would see a plastic sleeve (jumper) covering pins 1&2. Change this to cover 2&3. Wait a few minutes. Put it back on 1&2 and then replace the battery and then power on again.

The purpose of this is that it might rejuvenate the board if there was not any hardware damage.

I think im SOL. It didnt work. Oh boy this is not good. I wish there was something I could hook up or some other way to test if the IDE 2 on the mobo is fried. It appears ok and I didnt smell any burning or anything....DAMN YOU INTEL!!

I'm sure that you don't need to hear this but in the future don't work inside your computer with the power on

In a worse case scenario you can get a PCI IDE controller card.