Alright. I have an old Gateway desktop with AMD Athlon 800 MHz processor. Only 320 MB RAM. Onboard video and sound cards, etc. Everything is out-of-the-box from 1998. The "out of the box" hard drive is a 15GB drive. I have a second computer and a notebook that are nice, but I'm so proud that this old thing is still running. The small hard drive has been wiped and various versions of Windows have been reinstalled. I've tried all sorts of dual-boot combos with various versions of Linux and Windows. Every year or so, I wipe the drives and clean install a new experiment. I have added new hard drives and partitioned them in all sorts of ways. This is my play computer. I currently have a CD-RW and the original CD-ROM drive in the computer. This combination has worked for years. At some point (and I don't know when), both drives stopped working. They're recognized in My Computer, Device Manager, etc, but when are selected, error msg says, "please insert disc into drive." I put a DVD-ROM, another CD-ROM and another CD-RW in here, with all sorts of combos, and the same thing happens with ALL the drives, and several different data ribbons. None of the drives/cables work. At one point recently, my drives weren't recognized at all in My Computer, but after one reboot that changed. I have un-installed and re-installed the drivers, Windows drivers and the manufacturers' drivers. I have confirmed the secondary IDE channel IRQ is set to 15. I have confirmed that the drives are enabled in BIOS (and settings are config'd to "autoselect.") I have set the jumpers to cable select and the correct master/slave config. I checked that config.sys has "lastdrive=z," but my last drive letter is E: so that doesn't matter anyway. I have reseated the power and data cables numerous times in the tower. I may have tried other things that I cannot remember now. I cannot figure this out, someone please help. Thing that bothers me is, I currently have reinstalled Windows and have 1 hard drive with two logical partitions (ME, 2K) and one drive with XP. Is there anyway that there are conflicts in the OS? Could it be that the controller on the motherboard is just bad? Is it exhausted? There are no broken/missing pins, it appears okay. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Well, I may not have all the answers for you, but I will give it a go. First of all, it is possible your controller is bad. If you tried your drives in another computer, it'd be a pretty good way to be more sure about that. Another thing is you may want to try booting off of the optical drives. Burn a copy of something like dft or memtest to a disk and try to boot off of it. Make sure it is set to boot off of the optical drive in the BIOS. If it picks it up ok outside of Windows, you know it is just a Windows problem and that is at least a starting point. Hope that helps.
yeah, Fred's right, if the drives are recognized by the BIOS change the boot priority to boot from CD / DVD & try booting your original XP CD or another OS boot CD
Thanks. I tried some more things (before I read these posts), and I think that there's some conflict in my OS (or, OSs). I have tried the drives in a working computer, and all four of my drives DO work. I re-installed the firmware on two of my drives when I reinstalled the drivers. I also unplugged everything but one hard drive and one cd-rom, to see if I had a power supply going bad, but it still didn't work. I put a cd-rom drive as slave behind my hard drive (on primary IDE channel), and it still didn't work, so I'm guessing it isn't the controller. I am using 40-pin cables. I just checked the config.sys and autoexec.bat and there's no reference to mscdex (someone suggested that to me). I don't know if I can burn a cd, and I hadn't tried to put the OS system discs back in, 'cause I have new drivers on the drive. But... I put the files from my XP cd on my usb jump drive, and copied them to c: Then, I formatted one hard drive and clean-installed XP on it, using the copy. When I booted from the clean drive, one of my cd-rom drives works!!! I haven't tried the other three yet, but I'm guessing that it is an OS issue, which has been fixed. I'll post again if I find solution or if it breaks again. Thank you for the suggestions, though.
i hope you don't mind me calling you caz, but, anyway, what brand of PSU are you using & what is the power rating (wattage) even though wattage means nothing, cos some crappy 450W PSUs can power less stuff than a decent 300W PSU as far as i'm concerned 40 pin cables usually work as well as 80 pin cables (obviously ignoring the data transfer rate) try setting the IDE devices on the same channel as CS (Cable Select) mscdex hasn't being used in the autoexec & config since early Win9x & old Dos, but, you can force XP to view CD drives by adding mscdex to the autoexec (usually the Dos driver for CDs was oakcdrom.sys & was loaded first from the config.sys)
