Topic: Major CDRom drive problem

[Thumbsup]

Hi everyone,

Hopefully someone will be able to point me in the right direction here.

My system is a 3.5 year old Dell Optiplex (3 year warranty - typical!) with Windows 98 installed, original Sony CDRom drive and an HP CDWriter. All has been fine. After all this time W98 is getting a bit tired and needed a reinstall. And, the CDRom drive had stopped recognising that it had a disk in it. Took the opportunity to swop in a new CD Writer, in place of the orginal CDRom drive alongside the existing HP writer, and a bigger hard disk to support my increasing data requirments.

Using FDISK ,noticed that the CDROM driver could find any drives installed, despite both being connected. Checked the MAster/Slave switches and even Cable Select. Still no-go. Swopped the ribbon cable for a new one and still no go.

Windows 98 works fine (reinstalled it before I swopped the Drives) but it too does not find any CDdrives.

Where to go from here ? Is it a motherboard problem? or am I missing something fundamental. Help !!

All assistance appreciated.

Andy

[Simon]

Hi Andy, and  

No expert myself, but I've just built a new PC for someone, and had exactly the same problem.  I think I got confused with the Master / Slave jumpers, even though I was sure they were correct.  In the end, I swapped the IDE connectors round on the drives, and XP immediately found both of them.

Other than that, maybe W98 doesn't have the drivers for the new CD-RW?  Do you have an installation CD for it you could try?

Hopefully one of our techies will be about soon, to offer some proper advice.    In the meantime, you may find something useful in the link below:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;151550

[Sandra]

Hi Andy,have you got your hard drives on the primary IDE and CD writers on the secondary IDE ?
It sounds as if the cable isnt seated fully (or correctly) in the IDE socket on the motherboard,is it one of the ones where you can get it connected the wrong way round at either the mobo end or at the cd end ?
Are there any yellow ? or ! in the device manager ?

[Adept]

Using FDISK ,noticed that the CDROM driver could find any drives installed, despite both being connected. Checked the MAster/Slave switches and even Cable Select. Still no-go. Swopped the ribbon cable for a new one and still no go.

Hi Andy

First of all, FDISK will not see your CDRW drives. It will only detect Hard Drives.

You may find that you will get problems having both the new CDRW and and the old HP one to happily co-exist on the same IDE cable. Try removing one of the CD drives temporarily and see if that makes any difference.

[Thumbsup]

..........   correction everyone. Win98 startup diskette notifies the error, not FDISK.................

[Sandra]

Do you mean that it comes up with an error message saying that it cant load the ASPI drivers Andy ?
Youre not on SCSI are you ?

[Thumbsup]

W98 Start Up comes up with a message saying ' No drives found - driver installation aborted'............

[Sandra]

Have you checked in your BIOS and got everything set to AUTODETECT drives ?

[Thumbsup]

..... that's my next trick which I will try out tonite, together with reseating the cable, taking one out to see if it works on its own etc.   Thanks for the help so far.

[Thumbsup]

Thanks everyone. Problem resolved by updating the BIOS settings from None to Auto.  When do they get changed because I didn't do it, did I ?!

Rgds,

Andy  

[Sandra]

Glad its sorted Andy.
I dont think that the BIOS can change itself but its easy to catch the wrong bit when exiting or possibly loading BIOS defaults I suppose accidentally without realising if you have been in to check something :doggie: