Lite-on 32x + Win98 = trouble

[RalfHutter]

I'm trying to install a Lite-on 32x burner in my sisters IBM Aptiva which is using Win98 FE. It only has one available 5.25" bay so I removed her original CDrom drive, set the Lite-on as master and hooked it up. Windows starts loading to the splash screen and just hangs. Sometimes the progress bar moves and you can hear the HDD churning, sometimes the progress bar moves and there's no HDD activity, sometimes the progress bar freezes entirely and it just sits like that. I've let it sit like this for almost 10mins and it never does finish loading Windows. I have to CTRL+ALT+DEL to get out.

I looked in the BIOS to see if I could disable the splash screen so I could see what is happening during boot up but it's already set to "disable quiet boot" which shows as much of the boot process (just the POST) as it's going to.

I've booted into safe mode and the new burner seems to show in Device Manager as a "32x CDrom Drive" but nothing more specific. I tried uninstalling it and rebooting into Windows but it still never completes the boot process.

I've tried to boot into Windows using "bootlog.txt". It still fails and when I look at the bootlog.txt file in Safe-mode it shows that it fails booting as it starts to load Font files (specifically "Martlet").

If I remove the Lite-on drive, Windows loads fine. It also works if I put her original CDrom drive back in.

Anybody got any ideas? It's been over 2 years since I last used Win98 so maybe I'm forgetting something basic.


BTW - I searched the General Hardware, Periphals and Operating System forums but didn't find anything relating to this particular problem

 

[WarCon]

What is it set to? Master/Slave/Cable Select? You might try different configurations. You might also try it in a different system to see if its malfunctioning.

..............edit...........
Was rereading your post when I seen that you set it as Master. Try cable select maybe. You might also try booting on a Win98 boot disk to see if its your OS or not. The drive listed in safe mode is most likely the one you removed and has nothing to do with the burner. Good luck.....

 

[RalfHutter]

I tried it as both Master and slave, didn't try CS.

When you say "boot with a Win98 bootdisk", do you mean to set the CDrom to boot first and try and boot from the CDrom drive? Or boot from a floppy with CDrom support?

I think it's showing up right (partially) in device manager, there's a "32x CDrom Drive" showing, as well as her old drive (Sanyo blah, blah) even though her old drive is no longer present.

I took the drive home and put it into my WinXP rig. It get's detected fine but Nero won't see it no matter what I do. Nero has a utility to "force it " to recognize a drive by installing the Nero software into the drive that Nero can't find but this isn't working either.

Maybe there's something flakey with this drive, but so far I'm kinda blaming myself for not installing this thing correctly under Win98.

 

[WarCon]

If its not working correctly even on your system, its probably a unhappy drive and I don't think I would try too hard to get it working (Because if you do, it might end up being your worst nightmare if its intermittant). Call tech support and get an RMA? Did you just buy it from a company like Newegg? They are really good about replacing faulty equipment.

 

[RalfHutter]

I bought it from PC Club here in SoCal, I'll just take it back and exchange it.

 

[RalfHutter]

Took it back to PC Club to exchange it. The lady at the counter said it wasn't working because I was trying to install it into a system with an AMD (it's around 300-400Mhz or so) CPU that was "too slow". She said that I should try a 16x burner instead, but that this may be "too fast for her slow computer also".

Hmmm....Windows won't boot because the burner is too fast? That's a new one on me.

 

[WarCon]

, thats pretty dang funny.