CD-ROM missing in Windows '98

[sbox]

This is a frustrating situation. I have just upgraded to Win '98. I have two IDE ports (primary and secondary). On my primary IDE I have two HDD's. One is a 8.4 (master) and the second is a 1.2 (slave). The secondary IDE is for a 24x CD-Rom set as master. My CPU is a 400 AMD K6-2 Evergreen upgrade hooked to a Socket 5 (yes socket 5) hillary motherboard. The system works great except for my little CD-Rom problem.

When I boot, my MR BIOS detects the CD-Rom, however, by the time Windows '98 comes up, the CD-Rom is nowhere to be found. Here is where it gets interesting. If I shut the machine off and disconnect the IDE cable from the CD-Rom and then reattach it, Windows '98 recognizes the CD-Rom and everything is O.K.

This makes no sense to me. Why would the computer recognize the CD-Rom if all I am doing is pulling the main power cable from the tower and pulling the IDE cable from the CD-Rom?

This is frustrating because as it is, I have to keep my tower panels removed just so I can pull the IDE cable every time I shut down and then plug it back in while the computer is down for the computer to recognize the CD-Rom. Any suggestions?

[scotter]

try another cd-rom sounds like that one is going bad ?

[psyklone]

Well, you do have quite an interesting problem. One thing that you could try to do is boot up in safe mode and remove the cdrom from the device mangler, shutdown, cold boot into BIOS, reset configuration data, boot up to a startup disk, FDISK/MBR a couple of times, reboot into "normal" windows mode and see if it detects and stays detected. It sounds very possible that you may have some corrupt info in either your BIOS or possibly MBR. *disclaimer* Do not do the FDISK/MBR if you are dual booting OS's ... but you knew that already.

let us know how you do.

[papafudd]

When Win98 in installed, it will comment out
the line in the Autoexec.bat file that refers
to the CD-rom driver. It says, "this line removed by windows setup.
If you remove the rem before the driver statement, and delete all the spurious windows comments, the system should find the
CD-Rom drive OK and forever.

[EVGTech]

That is strange.

there are a couple of things to try here.
make sure the drive is set correctly as master or slave. make sure any hard drives on the same channel are set to master with slave present if it has that option.

look in the config.sys for the old cdrom driver. Packard bell uses an ancient cdrom driver that ussually will barf on a faster chip and windows wont rem it out.
it will look something like
device=c:\pbtools\atapi.sys

You can also try moving the cdrom to the slave on the primary.

[sbox]

Well, maybe I'm getting closer to a solution. After jacking around with the config and autoexec files, I'm not even getting the occasional accidental load. I don't view this as a step backward. In fact, my cd-rom drivers are becoming prime suspects.

It is a pioneer 24x. The latest drivers from Pioneer are version 307 which supposedly supports dvd and cd-roms (mmmm?).

Does anyone think I should rem all references to the atapi drivers and in fact nuke the atapi file? In other words, let Win 98 autodetect?

[Nathan]

Yes sbox. Try it.

[Knave]

Definitely try removing all references to your cdrom drivers in the autoexec and config.sys files.

Those ATAPI drivers caused havoc with my Windows 95, and I assume Win 98 would be the same. At best, my cdrom would run in Dos-Compatibility mode. At worst, it would disappear from Windows' list of drives.

I've never had a problem with any cdrom in Win 95 that the bios could identify as a cdrom device at bootup. And now I always remove those device drivers once Windows 95/98 is installed. I see your bios does detect your cdrom, so I'm curious to see if changing your startup files makes a difference.

-Michael

[This message has been edited by Knave (edited 12-19-1999).]

[Crahl]

yes of course you should. there really isn't much of a performance boost anyway. (correct me if i'm wrong)

just outta curiosity, if you didn't reattach your IDE cable and rebooted would Win98 detect it?

Cheers

[sbox]

Thanks to everybody for their help. The nod has to go to Scotter. He predicted bad CD-Rom. Well he was right in a way.

The problem ended up being a power supply problem. The power from the case cables were fine. However, the power in on the CD-Rom itself was bad. Hence, sometimes it would be detected by W'98 and sometimes not. Most times not.

I didn't diagnose the power supply culprit until my machine stopped funtioning at different times while the bad CD-Rom was recognized.

I now have a new CD-Rom up with no recognition problems and no power supply problems. Of course I'm not really happy with the Pioneer CD-Rom (24x) that I had to trash. It was barely two years old.

Oh well. . ., thanks to everybody for their help and advice.

Cheers,
sbox

[800XL]

As an FYI, EVGTech made a good point about the master/slave settings. MRBIOS sometimes has a fit trying to detect a cdrom that is alone on an IDE channel and set to slave and sometimes no matter what it is set to. If you play with the configurations you have possible of master/slave and IDE channels, there is almost always a solution though. From what you say, MRBIOS had no trouble finding the drive, just win98. So I doubt what I say above was directly related. I just thought I'd add a little info on topic if someone else comes across a similar problem.