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CD Burner Conflict.

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by woodesigner

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I have an old Dell running WIN98 SE. When booting the machine the CD burner light starts flashing & doesn't ever stop. The burner is not accessible. This happened shortly after installing a new multifunction HP printer/scanner on a USB port. No help at all from HP FAQS. Printer only has USB or I'd try a serial cable.

The machine shows no conflicts in device manager. Not sure what to do on this one.

5 replies

by robo_dev

Assuming that this is standard IDE CD-ROM, then it sounds like whatever startup program(s) the HP added are at fault.

Plan of Attack:
1) determine what programs are getting started automatically (look in windows startup group as well as windows registry). I would disable everything and add them back in one at a time to see which is the guilty program.

2) make sure there is no CD-burner software loading automatically at bootup It could be that somehow the CD software thinks the printer is a blank CD or something.

I would also try starting in safe mode...this tells us whether it is a program or a service that is at fault.

Does the fault happen with the USB device unplugged? Win98 had all sorts of weird problems with USB.

Also, check the boot order of the PC...it might help to make it so the PC cannot boot from the CD (do this thru BIOS setup).

by woodesigner

Poster rated this answer.
Error went away when I unplugged the USB cable, but I still couldn't find the actual trouble source of the conflict.

by thechas

If the CD drive light starts flashing before Windows starts to load, your problem is most likely hardware and not related to the new printer.

First, verify that the drive itself did not just happen to fail at the time you installed the new printer.

Unplug the IDE cable from the drive and see if the symptom goes away.

If the light still flashes, the drive is not passing it's internal POST test and will need to be replaced.

If the light stops flashing, and you can play an audio CD using the front panel buttons and headphones, chances are the drive is good.

Try a new IDE cable and see if the drive now works.

If the light starts flashing again after connecting the IDE cable, you may have a bad IDE controller.

You can also try unplugging the USB cable for the printer to verify that the USB and IDE controllers are not in conflict.

"IF" the drive light starts flashing after Windows starts loading, the HP Printer driver likely updated the USB driver for your motherboard. In doing so, it may have damaged the driver for the IDE controller.

CAUTION: Chip-Set driver installations can break other drivers.
Be prepared to re-install any system device driver.

I recommend that you install the latest W98 version chip-set driver for the specific chip-set on your motherboard.

Either download the latest version from Dell, or (assuming an Intel based motherboard) download the proper archived chip-set INF utility from Intel.

Chas

by woodesigner

Poster rated this answer.
The tip about chipset drivers gave me another clue. I checked HP web site & found out that the firmware for the printer itself needed an upgrade. After downloading and installing this upgrade the problem appears to have been fixed.

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