so earlier i was helping an old friend by hooking up her new sony cd burner onto her computer, its an old p2 gateway, anywho after i hooked it up windows refused to boot so i plaed around a bit and go it to boot in safe mode but nothing came from this so is tried to boot again, again failing so i unplugged the drive and kazamm windows boots fine. So the question is what am i doing wrong?? any help would be aweosme

Sounds to me as if the System was suffering from a Jumper configuration error where it can't work out what the first "bootable" device is.

Check that you have to jumpers correctly set in the back of the drive. It is possible sometimes to use Cable Select (CS) for both drives if you have two on one cable, however sometimes the CMOS gets a little confused, so you have to manually set one to be Master (MA) and the other to be Slave (SL)

The usually method of placement in a system is the First cable should be for the Harddrives, and the second for the CDroms, although sometimes there are slight alterations on this.

Hope that clues you up a bit to what the problem was.

yea i checked the jumper setting and they are ok, and in my expirence (which is very limited so i may be wrong) wont it not even boot and get stuck at the checking for ide devices screen if you jumper setting are wrong? so i tired all that any other possibilities or is their system just not compatible?
thanks guys

besides what stryder said:

could be your bios has some weird "i don't like that hardware so I won't start" thing.

get into it and see if for instance somehow it tries to boot from cd and forgets about the hard drive when you have a cd hooked to that port... or something. older bios was weird about that kind of thing sometimes, especially on proprietary motherboards that usually ship with those kidn of systems (hp,gateway, etc.)

Wes is right about branded PCs like Gateways and Compaqs acting funny with new hardware, but a CD Burner should always work. Maye the cable is bad.

Are you replacing a CDROM or are you adding one? What do you mean by "It won't boot" where does it stop?

I am trying to add one and it stops booting at the win 98 loading screen, the one that says win 98 floating in clouds, the little strip at the bottem moves for a sec and then it freezes.