My sisters have somehow managed to destroy just about every operable (software-wise) function of my old desktop computer (about a year old). So, I’m doing them a favor and wiping everything and starting from scratch.
The first thing I noticed is that only one of the disc drives (a CD-RW drive is installed, and a DVD drive; the DVD drive is not being recognize) isn’t showing up. Since I tinkered with the insides of this machine before, I figure maybe I screwed it up inside before, so before I did anything, I went inside and checked the jumper settings on the DVD drive. The CD-RW drive, attached to the “Master” end of the IDE cable, is set as master on the jumpers. The DVD drive, on the same IDE cable on the “slave” slot is set as slave on the jumpers.
I rebooted, no luck. I figure I’ll deal with it later. So I popped in the System Recovery disk that came with the computer and rebooted… it didn’t load from it. The instructions suggest that it should boot from the CD and start the recovery process. I went in and checked the BIOS settings to make sure that the order was Floppy->CD-ROM->HDD. 'Twas.
When I boot up, the CD-ROM (the recovery disk is in the CD-RW drive since I figure that’s the only one that’ll work) spins and reads, but then it continues to load Windows.
Can anyone suggest something I can try as to why either my DVD drive isn’t being recognized, or why the recovery disk isn’t loading at bootup? If it helps, the machine is running WinXP, but the recovery disk loads WinME. (I’ll upgrade back to XP after recovering).
Any help?