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CD drive doesn't work

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7 replies

by marcson98

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I have an old Dell Pentium 2 (200Mhz MMX) running Win98SE. I was looking at a CD I bought at a garage sale and as it was loading its introductory multimedia display I decided not to keep it and hit the escape button, the display stopped and I ejected the CD. The next time I went to use the CD drive it said "Drive Not Ready". I swapped in another known good CD drive, the cable, and checked the BIOS. None were the source of the problem. I pulled out the CMOS battery and replaced it to return CMOS to its defaults and the drive worked again. A week later I went to use the CD drive again (hadn't used it since) and it again said "Drive Not Ready". I again pulled out and reinstalled the CMOS battery but this time it didn't help. This CD drive now displays the same error on another PC I've tested it on. I next tried a known good CD drive on the original problem machine and it didn't work either(same error). Afterwords I retested it on another machine to make sure it still worked and it it doesn't work anymore either, indicating the same "Drive Not Ready" problem as the original CD drive, and is unusable. I don't want to risk any more CD drives tracing down the problem in such an old machine that I like, but is only a spare. Anybody have any ideas.

7 replies

by j.lupo

I am not entirely certain here, but i have had this problem once before and my drivers were bad. I reinstalled the drivers for the CD and it worked again.

That a good CD drive should stop working in a good machine after testing, I am not certain what could have happened there. My suggestion would be to check the connections on the drives and make sure the drivers are ok.

by biano

I'd remove anything else from the IDE bus to rule out a problem of interference. I've also seen floppy disks throw off hard drives and to be honest, this sounds like something in the system is frying the cd roms you stick into it. It could be a power issue but it's more likely to be something on the ide bus.

by gary56789

Copy the correct drivers for the CD-ROM to your computer (Desktop is a good place).

Disconnect any external hard drives and any CD-ROM?s. Change the jumpers on the CD-ROM in question to master and install into the PC (make sure to insert the primary IDE cable connector into the CR-ROM, with a known good cable), reboot. Tap the F8 key at startup when rebooting until you see the menu, then choose Safe Mode. Click start?Run?type ?msconfig? (without quotes)?click Startup tab?click Disable all?Apply?OK. Then go into Device manager and uninstall any CD-ROM drivers?reboot.

When rebooting gets to the Wizard detecting new hardware, manually install the newly downloaded CD-ROM driver(s). Check to see that the CD-ROM is working.

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