[mythtv-users] no DVD drive found? SOLVED

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:48:30 -0700
    > From: Greg Woods <greg at gregandeva.net>

    > Unclear what really fixed the problem, but I opened up the box. Remember
    > the story about the proverbial car where you had to pull the engine to
    > change the headlight bulb? That's what computer cases are like for me.
    > To remove the hard drive to check jumper settings, I had to pull the
    > memory chips. To get the DVD drive out, I had to pull the power supply
    > (but fortunately could avoid having to disconnect all the power cables).
    > Once I did that, the jumpers were correct: the DVD drive was jumpered as
    > slave, the hard drive as master. The only odd thing was that the blue
    > end of the IDE cable was plugged into the DVD drive and the black end
    > into the motherboard. The blue color of the motherboard connector
    > suggests that this is backwards.

Aha!

    > What I ended up doing was mounting the hard drive in the top section of
    > the bay closer to the DVD drive (which required a mounting bracket that
    > I happened to have). This is probably why the cable was "backward" to
    > begin with; before I moved it, the hard drive was too far away from the
    > DVD drive for the cable to be plugged in "forward". After moving it, it
    > would fit the "right" way.

    > At any rate, after spending an entire evening doing all this, the DVD
    > drive now works! And my very first attempt to play a DVD from within
    > Mythtv also worked. Haven't tried to rip any DVD's yet, the hardware
    > work took all the time I had.

    > I wasn't the one who built this box, so my ego won't be insulted here.
    > But does it really matter which end of the IDE cable is connected to the
    > motherboard? Aren't they just straight-through cables? Maybe the reason
    > the problem is fixed is that something wasn't quite seated right?
    > Although I tried reseating the cable connections before I actually
    > pulled any drives and it didn't help.

Oh yes, it matters.  It is -not- a straight-through cable!

See, for example, http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html,
in the bullet point labelled "detection".