CDROM Drive Troubles HELP

[wackycrazydumbdumb]

ive been fixin up my ancient win95 pc and installed another hard disc on it, and now my cdrom drive wont show up and cant be detected on the new hardware scan either. i dont think the cables are mixed up because the cdrom drive opens and closes but just wont show up. i opened control panel and took a look at my hardware and its tellin me i have problems with some of the ide cables on my motherboard now. what the heck is wrong? im goin to try to reinstall drivers for the cdrom and maybe somethin ell happen, but without a working cd drive the things useless. HELP ME PLEASE!

[ThePillarOfAutumn]

just get a new computer with XP on it - Steal it if you have too

[wackycrazydumbdumb]

no no no you dont understand. im fixin it up to sell it. so that i can start building a new pc. but no one will want it if the cd drive dont work. but i dont know whats wrong!

[Induna]

Is it Windows 98 thats on the disk? I had the same problem when trying to to install 98 on an old Dell Dimension P90. The Bios couldn't see the CDRom drive. I was told I had to manually install the drivers as Bioses back then weren't Plug and Play compatible.

It could also be an error encounted by Windows not recognizing the motherboard.



I encountered the same thing with an old Gigabyte GA-586AT.

The real problem is probably that Win 98 has made mistakes in recognizing your old motherboard.

The following is an excerpt from a post I made last year.

Re:GA-586AT Motherboard Identification.

And the replies to this post:

Re:Re:GA-586AT Motherboard Identification. Mike (4) 13-Oct-02

Setting up Win 98 on this board has uncovered a LARGE glitch. Win 98 correctly
identifies the two main chips in this chipset. HOWEVER, the Resources assigned to the
IDE Hard Disk Controller(s) in Device Manager are correct EXCEPT for the last I/O
address. What effect does this have you ask? Read on.
What the installer sees is that near the final stages of Setup when Win 98 is actually
loaded and working and wants to get files from the CDRom and the Win 98 cd, it can no
longer find the CDRom drive, and therefore the Win 98 cd. You get piles of errors, and
end up having to skip or cancel loading a lot of files. When Setup is finally done, you will
find in Device Manager a yellow ? beside the Hard Drive Controller, no dual fifo
listings under that heading, and no CDRom listing. Loading Real Mode drivers for the
cdrom drive (Autoexec.bat and Config.sys) will get it working, but there is no easy way
of loading all the drivers etc. missed in Setup, unless you wrote down those many file
names and destinations. The only other Hard Drive Controller you can load is the
Standard one, and it ends up with the yellow ? too, and all the same missing entries in
Device Manager. I tried running Setup again from Windows, real mode drivers still
loaded for the cdrom, and it knew there had been problems and ran in a recover mode,
taking longer than the original Setup. Got the drivers, etc., for the cards in the
motherboard working, but still had the ? beside Hard Drive Controller, and the missing
listings.
After much fiddling and research, I finally discovered that I could change (only?) the
last I/O setting for the Hard Drive Controller in Device Manager, in my case to
Fxxx-FFFF. When I rebooted, the dual fifo's were found while booting, and I looked in
Device Manager to find no ?'s, and the dual fifo's and cdrom listed!
There were still glitches in some software, so I started over by formatting C drive, which
has to be done with a floppy with Format on it, or a Win 98 Startup disk because the full
Win98 setup floppy does not have it.

I ran Setup with all my cards removed except for the video. I advise others to do the
same the FIRST TIME. I got a handful of files not loaded for the motherboard itself,
corrected the I/O address for the Hard Drive Controller, rebooted (2wice?), and the
missing motherboard files were loaded from the then working CDRom drive while booting
. I then installed the cards in the motherboard, and Windows (and I) loaded the drivers.

[hawkburn]

You said your sure the cables were not mixed up because it opens and closes. This just means you have the power cable correctly placed and the computer is on.

You might look again and make sure the IDE cables are correctly places from the CD-ROM to the motherboard.

But I'd wait for KRELL before I would do anything.

[Ea$y_E]

quite simple.......

if your able to open and close then yes power is supplied properly, remember the ide ribbon has red edge pointed/next to power connector

but the more obvious thing to check first would be the jumpers on the drives...

more often than not thats something thats over looked by inexperienced ppl

and its an occasional snaffu by tech experts as well

[Ea$y_E]

also why win95 if you gonna sell a machine dont use win95 gives the impression the machine is really old and you about to rip them off

best bet is to throw a linux distro on it and go from there

thing about linux......it runs great even on the fossils of a 486 pc
throw in a user manual and you should be fine just my opinion though do what you want its your rig