cd-rom not ready

Numerous possabilities.

CD drive may be dirty

Cd drive may have failed

IDE driver may be missing or corrupt

IDE cable may be loose or bad

Chas

In addition to Charles' answer, another possibility is that the CD(s) you are trying to read are not compatible with the drive, but this is a long shot. CD ROM drives prior to 1997 do not have UDP capability which means that they cannot read CD-RW CD's, but should be able to read CD-R and CD-ROM CD's.

Swap out a known good CD to test.

If still no good, swap out the CD drive into another PC to see if it works in the other PC--no drivers are needed for CD drives on Windows 98 and up OS's. If it's good in the other PC, test the ribbon cable the same way.

Since this is a 486 PC, you could have DOS or Windows 3.11 installed, but you didn't say. If so, check your CONFIG.SYS + AUTOEXEC.BAT files to make sure that the CD is indeed installed in there correctly and not remarked (REM) out.

HTH

First I'll assume the drive used to work. Since this is a 486 the drive's probably read it's last disk.

Again assuming that it used to work and if we pay close attention to the error message that you're getting, "drive not ready" we know the drivers are loaded otherwise the CDROM wouldn't appear in DOS, File Manager, Explorer or My Computer. So drivers isn't the issue.

I would replace the drive. A good place to look for a replacement is a used computer store. You can probably get one for$10-20.00

On a system this old the CD drive may be connected to your sound card. It will be very hard to find a compatible replacement. If it is I'd replace both.