hey guys hows it going
have been on a few times and your advice has been great so here I am again, u wouldn't believe i've got an hnd in this stuff! Installed a new hard drive and eventually got round the graffics card prob .. now when I've gone to boot it up the cd rom isn't showing went back into bios and its showing that its there but no sign on system ??? baffled any idea's ? all advice welcome alison

I think we might need a little more explanation Alison.

When you say it's in the BIOS, do you mean that you've gone into the BIOS settings screens and you can see it listed as a device in the same place as your hard drive on, for example, Primary Slave or Secondary Master?

When the system boots and it runs through the POST, showing you your memory being checked and counted and then listing your hard drive(s), does it list your CDROM drive as well.

Once you get to Windows, can you see it in Windows Explorer?

What about if you right-click on My Computer, select Manage from the menu and then go into Disk Management. Can you see it as a volume in there? If so, does it have a drive letter associated with it?

spent yesterday playing with the machine ggggrrrrr ... tried allsorts .. moving jumpers .. setting bois differently .. in all different positions .. cdrom is showing in bios but not on the posts and not in disc management .. do u think its maybe a power problem .. power supply box has blue speckles and so do some of the power points???

Wouldnt worry to much about those speckles.

Could you check on thing ?
If you boot up Windows, then rightlick on "My Computer" and select "Properties" it will open up system properties. Then go the "Hardware" ab and into "Device Manager".

There is a section CD/DVD drive and IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Whats listed in those sections ?

nope its not showing there either .. totally baffled !!! starting to think its either the power or cd roms knackered but it was working cos it let me install w2k and then just disappeared .. mmmmmmmm anyone any idea's