Hi all

I have a Windows 98 PC that is refusing to acknowledge the CD ROM Drives. It has a reader and a writer and when the PC boots it says "Detecting IDE Drives:

Primary Master: <some hard drive>
Primary Slave: None
Secondary Master: LG CDRW Drive
Secondary Slave: Creative CDROM

But then when Windows boots My Computer doesnt display it?

Are the drives seen in 'Device Manager'?

And is it Win98 or Win98SE?


.

Are you sure the computer is seeing the drives? Is it set to AUTO on each of the IDE options in the BIOS? Check it's set to auto and not those particular drives manually.

Yep the drives are all set to AUTO in Bios. No the drives do not show in Device Manager.

If you start with a 98 boot disk and select Start wih cd-rom support does it set up the cd drive then?

Do you have any Adaptec software installed? This can occasionally play silly buggers and delete all CD drives. There's a Microsoft Knowledgebase article on it somewhere, I'll try and dig it out.

In the meantime, just check your drives are OK by booting a CD-ROM.

This used to crop up a surprising amount of times when I used to be a tech-support call centre monkey.

If all the above suggestions fail, open up a command prompt (or you may have to hammer at F8 while loading & choose "command prompt only", it's been a while), & run...

fdisk /mbr

...& see it that works after a restart.

I also had a PC that did similar, & clearing the CMOS fixed it, pretty sure they weren't even being seen by BIOS though so may be irrelevant.

**DISCLAIMER - while running "fdisk /mbr" will NOT break anything, otherwise messing around with fdisk if you don't know what you're doing is NOT a good idea. Try the above, EXACTLY as I typed**