Help! CD-RW problems...driver weirdness?

[Barryj61]

Ok....this one's got me stumped. Trying to get the CD-RW drive on my kid's computer working without success. Here's the basic info:

Win98SE
ECS K7S5A Motherboard
Hitachi DVD drive as secondary master
Lite-On 12X CDRW drive as secondary slave

Now for the strangeness...the BIOS recognizes all the drives exactly as they should be. Windows Explorer shows both drives (D for the Hitachi and E for the Lite-On), but will only read from the Hitachi (that is, won't recognize any CDs put in the Lite-On drive, blank or otherwise). Device Manager shows neither drive!! In other words Device Manager shows no CD-ROM drives on the system, yet the Hitachi drive works just fine anyway. Everything else on this system has worked perfectly for months; just never realized that the CDRW drive wasn't working (kids can be that way). I've tried installing both Nero and Roxio CD Creator; of course, neither one can find the Lite-On drive. Anyone have any suggestions on where to start?

 

[Barryj61]

OK....the plot thickens. I dug around a little more and found that some nefarious driver installation program that came with the Lite-On drive put these lines into my system files:

In CONFIG.SYS it added DEVICE = C:\CDROM.SYS /D:MSCD000

In AUTOEXEC.BAT it added C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD000

Now, it's my understanding that this is housekeeping that Windows should handle, so I removed these commands (by "remarking" them out). Rebooted and the Hitachi drive still works perfectly, and now it appears in Device Manager like it should. But now the Lite-On drive is nowhere to be found (in either Device Manager or Windows Explorer). Any other suggestions?

 

[no0b]

are the master / slave / cs jumpers on the right setting

Strange how you need a driver for a cd rom drive maybe try to completely uninstall the drivers then see what happens and if you really need the drivers see if the mfg has a newer version.

 

[JonnyDuke]

The drivers that came with the Lite-On are probably causing the problem. I had a system running Win98 and used a Lite-On 12X10X32 with no problems just using the Win98 and Roxio drivers. Also you should install the CD drives on seperate IDE channels to avoid slow downs.

Also as No0B suggests, check your jumper settings... and your cable connections just to be sure it's not something simple as a loose power cable.