CD-ROM MoBo Power-up problem.. (Strange)

[Zippycut]

I'm having a pretty weird problem. When I boot up, with the secondary IDE cable for my CD-Rom connected, my CD-Rom doesn't receive power, and the bios cannot detect my hard drives. When i disconnect the secondary IDE cable from the motherboard, the CD-Rom powers up, and my computer boots as normal (normal meaning as crash-ridden as ever, but within the limit for Windoze.) My sytem specs are as follows:
K6-2 400 Mhz (Running at 401MHz according to SiSoft Sandra. ? )
192 MB ram.
Soyo Socket7 Motherboard.
Award Bios 4.51
Voodoo3 3000 PCI
MX300 Sound Card
2 Western Digital 9.5 Gig hard drives


The strange thing is, it used to work fine, but I disconnected it to check the jumpers, and when I reconnected it, I got this problem. Any and all help would be appreciated.

[qball]

What type of CDROM? If it is a Kenwood Zen drive, you may have a bigger problem.

Let me get this straight.

Your CDROM is the slave (secondary device) on one of the IDE channels. The CDROM also should have its own power connector. With the cable between the IDE controller connected to the CDROM, the CDROM is not detected. ARE YOU SURE THE CABLE IS CONNECTED PROPERLY? When you disconnect the cable between the CDROM and the IDE controller, the box will boot, the CDROM gets power, but should be useless, right?

I'll assume the 2 HDs are the masters on each IDE channel.
OK, what jumpers did you mess around with?
Are you sure you haven't changed the BIOS for the IDE channel with the CDROM (CDROM now master, drive slave)? In which case IF the cable is backwards, the BIOS could not recognize the CDROM and therefore won't continue to init the next device and next channel.

Check your BIOS settings for both IDE channels. Check what jumpers you have changed. One other thing is to check that the cable hasn't failed (stranger things happen). You can use the other IDE cable for the second drive that is not the boot drive, just to verify the CDROM.

Hopefully this helps you figure it out.