lost CD writer and DVD drive

They're both connected on the same cable to the motherboard, so I'm thinking there's possibly something wrong there.

Greg's my brother. The father of the little one in the photo. Can someone help us please.

How 'bout some background info...a bit of explanation about what happened & what you've tried so far, greg?

Do you see anything under DVD/CD-ROM Drives in the Device Manager? (To get there in Win9x, right-click My Computer, click Properties, then click the Device Manager tab.)

I checked the device manager and it doesn't have any CD drives listed. These seem to be under IDE controllers (and there's several exclamation marks) . Greg is even less knowlegdable about this stuff than me. Next time I'm there I'll list what's it's saying.

If you can, give us the exact order of the device tree, and then the exact wording of each of the items preceeded by the exclamation marks.

It might also be helpful for us to know the make and model of the machine.

Also when your pc boots is it finding the drives at that stage?

Do you understand what a BIOS is? (not meant to be patronizing btw)

Yep, I know what the BIOS is. I"ll be over there on Sunday. I'll list everything I can find then.

A few things to look at when you get there -

- Make sure both the primary and secondary IDE controllers are enabled and Win98 sees them both properly first. Since the cable in this case is connected directly to the motherbaord I'm assuming the IDE controllers are integrated into the motherbboard. You'd enable/disable the controllers in the BIOS settings.

- Check the drives to make sure that either one is set to "Master" and the other as "Slave" or that they are both set to "CS" (Computer Select). Setting one to "Master" and the other to "CS" is a bad idea. These settings are done with small plastic jumpers on the drives themselves so you'll probably have to pull them out of the PC to check them.

(CS==Cable Select )


While doing the stuff fishin' mentioned, also make sure all the cables are tight. If the CD media drives aren't even detected during the bootup POST check, one possibility is that one of your EIDE controllers on the motherboard went bad. (To test this you could put one of the CD drives on the same ribbon cable as your HD, and see if that works.)

Just thinkin' along here ... if the computer had been functioning nominally, then, with no physical user-imposed internal hardware changes, simply "lost" the optical drives, I strongly doubt jumper settings are a factor. I would first detach-and-re-attach, several times, both the data and power cables of each drive, and at both ends, the object being to rule out poor physical connection issues. In fact, if it were my machine, I'd carefully employ a thorough contact-cleaning regimen on the entire connector system ... cable-end both ways, including the power cables, and on the drives themselves. I would also check the power connectors for proper voltage. Just some suggestions, if it becomes necessary to wade into the machine's case.

Wilso mentioned something in another thread about his brother picking up a new motherboard and putting it in. I was just assuming that that and this were related.

Oh ... I missed the part about replacing the mobo ... that could be a factor for sure ... how did that change relate timewise to the drive-detection problem?

No new motherboard. This machine has never been opened.

Might wanna get plenty of canned air, and have a vacuum cleaner handy. Its amazing what'll find its way inside a 'puter over a few years.