Emachine experts - - - Help

[Doug V.]

I need some help from you guys that know a whole lot more about these aggravating machines than I do.

I reformatted my son's hard drive and installed Win98 with the Emachine CD that came with his machine. His system had lot's of gremlins and Win98 could not see the CD drive.

Using the "Emachine" CD, everything went great. It installed all the .cab files and Win98. But it still doesn't see the CD drive. Everything else works just fine. Why can't it see the CD drive now. It must have seen it OK to reinstall the O/S?

The only thing we did prior was to install an additional 64 Megs of PC100 RAM. The system recognized the additional RAM and everything seemed OK. I can't see how the additional RAM could result in this problem.

The Device Manager does not show the CDROM and shows a yellow exclamation point at the "primary and secondary (dual fifo)" IDE Controllers.

Are we missing the CD drivers? Shouldn't they have been installed in the reinstallation process?

Any help would be greatly appriciated.

Doug

[Mntsnow]

It sounds like your controllers are not setup correctly. First option would be to "uninstall/remove" the controller from the device manager and reboot the system. Go into your bios and make sure you have the IDE devices setup correctly in the bios. (choose AUTO if it is an avaliable option) Let the machine reboot. It should detect the presence of the IDE controllers and install the drivers. If you still do not have access to the CD rom drive at that point post back and we will proceed further down the troubleshooting path.....

btw. Since you did state that prior to the problem you had just installed additional memory I would suggest going back into the case and make sure the IDE cables are FIRMLY and FULLY seated as you might have slightly dislodged them