Why this happened???

[groovemaster1]

I removed my dvd burner to go to a friend's to burn some movies, & changed it to cable select (Dell). It worked fine.
But when I put it back into my system & boot, I get a black screen, saying windows has encountered an error or hardware change (I can't remember what it said), and choose to boot windows normally but it doesn't start, it sticks there.
Later I remembered I changed it to CS so I changed it back to MA (DVD burner) & SA (DVD ROM), and windows booted fine.

Another time i switched my modem & sound card to different pci slots & booted, having to reinstall drivers for both because windows saw them as new devices attached.

Why does this happen???

[madmat]

The CS issue causes a hardware issue by having the cable position choose the drives role (Master or Slave) by its physical location on the cable, if you have it with one drive set to MA and another set to CS and the CS drive is on the end of the cable and the MA drive is on the inner plug then you've essentially got 2 Masters on the same cable. The same can be said of Slave and CS. CS is evil, never use it. Instead specify all drives to make certain that the drive you want to be the Master on the line will be regardless of its physical location on the cable.

As to the latter, well, that has to do with device manager and the IRQ of the PCI slots in question. When you move a device from slot 1 to slot 4 (For instance) you've just changed the IRQ of that device so as far as Windows is concerned you've just installed a new piece of hardware. Your PCI slots share IRQs so the chances are like 1 in 4 (Roughly) that you'll pop that device into a slot that shares the same IRQ as the original slot and not have Windows search for drivers. It's basically the luck of the draw.

Good luck!

[groovemaster1]

OH! I see, thanks...!

[madmat]

No problem, just chalk it up to technology. Welcome to tomorrow.