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Problems With CD ROM Support

S

Salvador

Diamond Member
I'm having problems getting cd rom support while trying to load Windows 98SE.

Let me back up for a minute. I just installed a new Maxtor 40 gb hdd and ATA controller card. I have the controller card and the cd rom installed on the controller card.

When I go to boot my system up off of floppy, it asks me if I want to start up with cd rom support and then after I choose this, it just lists my cd rom information and driver and hangs there.

Now.. The cd rom spins up when I turn the machine on, but after I select to start up with cd rom support, it stops and just hangs at that text that gives me the driver and drive type.

I called Maxtor and they said that it should be working. They told me to either call the pc manufacturer (which I don't have support for) or call Microsoft. Prior to installing this drive, I didn't have any problems with this Windows cd or the cdrom.

What should I do at this point?

Do I need to install new drivers for this cd rom before I can install Windows? It's a fresh hdd and the drivers were on the original hdd.

Thanks!

Sal
 
move the cd rom off the controller card and onto the onboard IDE connectors... then put it back on the card after the install is complete.

EDIT: Or if you have two machines networked, you could do an install oaver the network.
 
Yeah. Take the ATA100 controller out of the equation until everything else is all set. You should just be able to move the cd from the onboard IDE to the controller after you get the system up and running. You might want to put both the disk and cd back on the onboard ide, so you don't have to fool with any jumpers.
 
I tried moving the cd rom and the hdd back onto the motherboard IDE channels and it's still not giving me any cd rom support.

I figured that I shouldn't have installed the controller card and the hdd at the same time. I was sort of taking a chance there, that didn't really pay off. The problem now is that I can't get the cd rom to work any way that I have it set up. The controller card is now completely out of my system. All I have hooked up is the hdd, cd rom and floppy. I'm getting floppy support and I think I'm getting hdd support, but no cd rom support. The cd rom is hooked up as master on my secondary mobo IDE channel and the hdd is set up as master on the primary mobo IDE channel.

What's so strange about the cd rom is at one point, the light would flash and the drive would spin up and now I can't get it to do that. Even though the cd rom appeared to be working, the system still didn't detect it or give me support for it. I figure that it's got to work on the mobo IDE because it did before.

Is there anything that could've happened to the onboard IDE channels or the cd rom?

I thought I wasn't getting support for the hdd on the mobo IDE channels and then it said that something was installed correctly from the floppy. This leads me to believe that the hdd is being recognized.

The weird thing is that if I go into the BIOS and select auto select for the Primary and secondary IDE, it says that nothing is detected. What's going on?

Do I need some sort of driver to get the cd rom working before I go to install Windows?

Thanks again. :|😕

Sal
 
Not all cdroms will work with the generic cdrom drivers on the standard Windows bootdisk.

Also, have you doublechecked your jumper pin on the back of the CDROM to make sure it's set for master? Are you sure you have the red stripe of the data cable on Pin #1 of both the CDROM connector and on the IDE Connector on the MOBO?

I'd go looking for the specific CDROM drivers for your drive from the manufacturer, and create your own bootdisk. (just format a floppy with the system files, then copy over mscdex.exe to the floppy and edit your config.sys and autoexec.bat accordingly.

You can also try one of the generic bootdisks at bootdisk.com to see if any of those will prompt your cdrom to work.

You shouldn't need any external drivers to get the thing working in Windows. Virtually all drives have built in support. Keep the CDROM on the motherboard's ide controller till it's up and running.

You can find out if the hard drive is being recognized from the bootdisk simply enough by choosing NO CDROM Support, and then try to change to the hard drive.
 
Just to parrot back what Slikkster said, make absolutely sure the jumpers on both the drive and the CD are what they're supposed to be and that the cables are hooked up right. Sometimes they are tabbed (which helps a lot) and sometimes they aren't. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to get them backwards. If it still doesn't work you can try reversing the cables, as long as you can do it without destroying anything. You could also try a different cable (hey, stranger things have happened). Or you could try just hooking up the CDROM (no hdd) and see what happens. The maxtor controller seems to have nothing to do with the problem, so I wouldn't hesitate to put it back in once everything is fixed.

Sometimes with stuff like this the best thing is to just walk away from it for a little while.
 
The jumpers are fine. The cables are on correctly. BTW.. I don't see how the cables can go on incorrectly. I tried putting them on the wrong way on purpose and couldn't get the cable on that way.

The weird thing is that I can only get the cd rom to spin up when I have it hooked up to the controller card. Is this because the controller card is working and spinning this thing up? I can't get the cd rom to do anything on any of the IDE channels on the mobo.

Could something have happened with my cd rom drive? What's really strange is if I pull the controller card out of the system and hook up the hard drive the same way as the old one was on the mobo IDE channel and then put the cd rom on the secondary mobo IDE channel, I can't get anything to work. The system doesn't even recognize the hdd this way. I have to have the hdd on the controller card to even recognize it. Could this be because this is a Celeron 366 system and it doesn't support a new 40 gb Maxtor?

What I was thinking of trying is taking the cd rom out of my other system temporarily and then hooking it up to see if I could get it to work with the other computer set up. I guess that would rule out a problem with the cd rom then. My question here is, I don't have to completely install the cd rom into the case, do I? Can I just have the cd rom laying loose, hooked up and try it? I hope there is not grounding issue because I'm going to try it. I don't feel like reconfiguring the mounting brackets just to test the cd rom drive in the other machine.

Anyway.. By the time someone replies to this, I will probably have tested this other cd rom drive and will report back.

I downloaded the bootup disk from bootdisk.com and it said invalid system disk. The 1st and 2nd copy of my Win98 bootup disks seem to work fine with the exception of not giving my cd rom support. I don't see why this bootup disk won't support it anyway. It's a pretty standard cd rom drive made by Samsung.

I also have no clue on how to add drivers to a bootable disk. I do not know where to find the drivers either because they are not on the manufacturers disk.


Thanks again,

Sal

 
Ok.. Update. I tried a totally different cd rom in the system that I'm having troubles with an the system does not read this one either. Actually, it does the very same thing. Says that no Atapti cd roms are detected. What I think is strange is that it listed the cd rom as the same exact drive, even though this one is made by a different manufacturer.

So.. If it's not a defective cd rom, it's got to be in my system then? BIOS? There aren't that many settings in the BIOS and I'm pretty sure I have it configured properly. When I use auto detect though, it does not detect anything in the primary or secondary IDE channels when the hdd and cdrom are installed directly on the mobo.

The weird thing is that things seem to work better when I have the cd rom and hdd running off the controller card. The system doesn't even recognize the hdd on the mobo controller and the cd rom doesn't even spin up.

BTW.. I tried it with 2 different cables, in case you were thinking the cable was bad and I made sure that it was hooked up properly.

I just don't know where to turn now. My friend that is pretty good with computers has no idea. Maxtor is pretty much leaving me high and dry even though all my problems started when I went to upgrade to their controller card and hdd. Help!

Sal
 
If you hadn't already figured this out I'm from the "just keep doing stuff no matter how dumb it seems until something works" school.

This is an upgrade, right? Do you still have the old system disk? If you do, how much of a hassle is it to put that back in and see if it boots? Or put system files on the maxtor (somehow) and see if you can boot from that? At this point I guess just getting the thing to boot up is the thing to shoot for. If you have a bootable hdd you can put the the primary master without any other ide devices I guess that's as stripped down as you can get.

Signed, much sympathy, no more ideas.

 
I tried putting the system back to the way it was prior to the upgrade and I can't get it to boot. The original hdd had Windows installed on it and it should boot if I put it back to normal, shouldn't it?

I have no idea what's going on here. Could it be something in the BIOS that I changed? If I put the original drive back on the primary IDE channel and have the BIOS set to autoselect, shouldn't it detect the orginal hdd? I can't get it to detect either the original hdd or the cd rom. At this point, I'd just be happy if it detected the original hdd.

Anyone have any other ideas?

Sal
 
Start with basics first.. what motherboard are you using, processor, bios settings in CMOS? I have quickly read the posts here but there is a lack of information in that respect. Is the Controller card bios posting and detecting your drives? Is the controller on a Buss Mastered PCI slot with its own unshared IRQ? Is your system bios set to boot to SCSI? What type IDE controller is onboard to your system and what devices do you have connected to the onboard when your HDD and CD are on the controller? In Bios do you have the settings for the onboard IDE set to NONE?

The drivers windows installs for the CDROM are standard Oakrom Atapi CDROM drivers and should work fine for most Atapi CDROMS. It usually wont identify the make and model of your drive, just how many are onboard and if more than one, which Windows will use as your cdrom for the install. If its freezing up you have a hardware issue likely, and more likely an IRQ conflict. I would remove all PCI cards untill you have the OS installed except for the Maxtor controller, and I also would do as suggested and run the CDROM off the mobo IDE controller. If it still locks up you may have a bad cable, wrong cable, jumper problem or a bad drive.

I know some of this is repetitious from other posts but you need to really look close to hardware configuration..
 
I think Mastertech's info on the bios is key here...I was going to write the same earlier myself. Make sure, as he said, that your controllers are not "disabled" in the bios. I think having them set for Auto is the best option for you.
 
This is a Emachines 366is that I bought cheap to get me by until I build my first system (if my confidence isn't totally shot after this experience) this fall. I can't link this exactly, but here's the Emachines site.

It's basically a socket 370 mobo with a 366 Celeron.

The PCI slot is slot 2 and I'm not sure if it's Busmastered or not. I was told to use slot 2 by the Maxtor because they said that it liked it there.

I originally had the controller selected to scsi so it would read the card. Maxtor said to do this because it reads the card like a scsi card.

The card was posting and it seemed to be recognizing the hdd fine off the card, but the cd rom wasn't being detected even though it was spinning up. I couldn't get past this point because I couldn't get the BIOS to recognize the cd rom to install Win98SE.

At this time, there was nothing hooked up to the onboard IDE controllers. I only had the new hdd and the cd rom installed and both were on the controller card on their own channels set to master.

Ok.. Maybe it was recognizing the drivers as being from the Oakrom. That's why I thought it was recognizing the two different cd rom's as the same drives. I did mention that, didn't I? I thought the cd rom was bad, so I tried a cd rom from a different system and couldn't get the BIOS to recognize that one either.

In the BIOS I have the onboard IDE channels set to autodetect and they are not detecting the drives. I might have had them disabled when I was trying to install through the controller card. Right now, I've been trying to just get the system back to the way it was originally and then just take it one step at a time from there.

There really aren't that many settings in this BIOS. I have boot up sequence and then I have the Primary master, primary slave, etc.. That's pretty much it from what it looks like. Is there anything that I have to pay close attention to?

Like I said, I have tried to go back to the basics. I put the old hdd back in along with the cd rom. The original hdd is back on the primary onboard IDE channel and the cd rom on the secondary IDE channel (both set to master). I can't get the BIOS to recognize the old drive now.

I've pretty much taken the controller card out of the equation until I can get the new hdd installed. I think I should at least get the mobo IDE and BIOS to recognize the old hdd again first. It already has the OS on it and it worked beautifully a few days ago before the upgrade.

I guess I don't know what else to say and hope that I've answered all of your questions. This is beginning to be a real PITA!

Thanks again!

Sal
 
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