You don't need a sound card to run the cd-rom drive, why? Doesn't the drive work?

no..and its not recognizing the drive either..tells me its not plugged in on both cd-roms ive tried

so, you've tried inserting a cd and it tells you the hard drive isn't plugged in is that it?

that or when i dbl click the desktop cr-rom icon..it wont let me access it. Its all hooked up to as far a i can tell and both CD-ROMS i have work

ah... you're spinning me out here. What can you see when you go to my computer?

It has all my drives listed,floppy drive and my cd-rom drive..but when i click the cd-rom it says " O:\is not accessable..the device is not ready". O is my CD-ROM

you being able to see it means it was connected properly... hmm is it on a channel by itself? If so make sure it is the master drive, if it is on an IDE channel with another cd-drive, you must make one master and one slave, if it is on an IDE channel with a hard drive, I would suggest making the cd-rom slave and the hard drive master... Although windows detecting it makes me believe there is no issue there. Perhaps the cd-rom is broken? Are you certain it's working properly?

Honestly Im not sure what all that means..im not very comp litterate about things like that..all i know is i have 2 hard drives and a floppy and a cd-rom in this comp. Would be so much easier to do this if you were able to see it yourself. Thats the downfall of being comp illiterate

Don't get discouraged yet Vasago. Pay attention to what we say, and read everything about computers you can get your hands on. If you take the time to remember the information you read, you will get to be computer literate. (What drives me nuts about most users is they don't pay enough attention the first time to remember how to do the simpleist of things.)

You know what the basic parts of the computer are, and that's a good start. Describe to us how the data cables (and not the power cables) are routed.

Is it:
Floppy Drive: 1 connector to motherboard, the others are "floating free"
Hard Drive: 1 connector to each hard drive, one on the motherboard
CD-ROM Drive: 1 connector to motherboard

or are the first hard drive and CD-ROM drive on the same cable?