Hello All
I am hoping some one here can help on this one.
I just installed a CD-RW drive on the computer(I am supprised Ayesha has not started a topic about it in the pit yet)and now Win95 can’t find the drive at start up.
After start up I can click on Start>Settings>Control Panel>System>Device Manager and no CD drive is listed,but when I click the refresh button it finds the drive and is able to access it till the computer is shut down or rebooted then I have to go thru the drill all over again.
Anybody have any ideas how I can fix this little problem?
Thanks
Yep. Pull the drive and check the jumper pinout on the back of it. For Windoze95 you need the installation diskette or CD that came with the CDRW.
Thanks for the reply Tcburnett.
The drive jumper is set to master on the second IDE channel and all the drivers and CD burning software are installed from the driver CD-ROM disk.(software updates downloaded and installed also)
The only difference between the new drive and the old CD-ROM drive it replaced is that the old drive was jumpered as slave on IDE channel 2.
Still working on it.
Thanks Again
did you use the install floppy? Thats very important to use.
also run ‘detect new hardware’
1: General Suggestion - Upgrade to 98 -
2: Specific suggestions:
If you have driver statements in your autoexec.bat or config.sys files that refer to the drives specific channel assignment(s) and IRQ address this could be confusing the system. Either rem the statements out or if the system will not find the CD automatically remove any reference in the driver statement to channel position (ie (slave/master or IRQ assignment) and let the driver find the drive channel presence itself automatically.
If you have a slave on channel 2 double check that it is jumpered correctly. Also try a replacement cable, or if relacement not avail, try swapping the channel 1 and channel 2 cables.
3: If all else fails try putting the CDRW drive as the slave of the master hard drive and make sure the hard drive is set to master re S/M and not single (on some drives master/single is identical mode and on some it is two separate modes with different jumper settings)
All good points above, but I’d like to add one:
Some motherboards and/or drives seem to not like to support a CD or other ATAPI device as the only device on an IDE channel. I have seen several drives not work at all until they were installed as the slave to a hard drive, after which they worked fine.
Thanks for the replies, Handy, Astro and Jo3sh.
I don’t believe the problem id with the mother board, as the old CD-ROM drive was on the same channel by it’s self.
I am beginning to suspect that it is a firmware problem with the CD-RW drive. The drive is a very new model that has just recently come on the market, and it still has firmware version 1.0.
Thanks again,
Is it Plug & Play? If so, did you turn on Plug & Play Operating system in the Bios?
Actually, the firmware on your CD-RW is probably okay. It might, however, be a problem with your motherboard BIOS. Some old motherboards can’t handle some of the newer IDE devices. Go to the motherboard manufacturer’s site and see if they have a BIOS update. Install the latest one even if it doesn’t specifically address your hardware in the list of changes made. Also, you should tell us a little bit more about your computer, like:
What kind (brand and model) of CD-RW?
What version of Win95? (original version, A, B, or C?)
What kind of CPU and Mainboard?
What other IDE devices are in the system?
The ATAPI standard that your CDRW uses to communicate is pretty…um…standard, so it probably is not your CDRW firmware.
Oh, I just remembered, you might have to update your ASPI layer in Windows if you have an old version of Win95. Try this before updating your motherboard’s BIOS.
Here is a link for you:
http://www.datman.com/tbul/dmtb_028.htm
Hope it works.
Also, beyond the BIOS, you should be concerned with the busmastering software for you motherboard. YOu most likely (wide generalization here) Have a PIIX 4 motherboard – if you sitll have the orgional version of your busmastering, then you may need to get a updated version – check with the MBD manufacture
Hello Again All
To answer all the questions ask so far.
Here are my computers specs
M/B = PcChips M-571 socket 7 built in 11-1998 with A.M.I enhanced BIOS rev#7,PnP aware and enabled
Chip = Intel PentiumMMX 233
Ram = 64Mbytes PC-66 Sdram
IDE ch.#1 Master = Seagate 1GB ATA-33 H/D
IDE ch.#1 Slave = Seagate 4.3 GB ATA-66(running in ATA-33 Mode) H/D
IDE ch.#2 Master = LG (Lucky Goldstar) CED-8083B CD-RW (this one is the problem)
IDE ch.#2 Slave = empty
OS = Windows 95a with all service packs,patches and updates installed
Latest IDE BussMastering drivers downloaded and installed (tried uninstalling IDE drivers and just running on the stock Windows IDE drivers,didn’t fix the problem)
ASPI layers up to date and verified
I tried swaping the IDE cables from ch.#1 to ch.#2 and vice versa with no improvement
I just got off the phone with LG tech support and am going to try one last thing and if that does not work the the drive is going to be shiped back to the manufacturer for replacement.
Thanks all for taking the time to give my problem some though and posting your suggestions.
How it’s time to rip the cover off this beast one last time.
Thanks Again
With all due respect even if you manage to get the drive properly recognized your base platform (re CPU esp) is borderline inadequate re system hardware resources for consistent, successful burns. Disk burning is one of the more resource hungry things you can do on a PC.
You could probably burn a CD OK if you saved it to disk (vs direct copy) as a ISO (or CIF) file but your disk resources for storing a library of these hundreds of meg sized files is light.
Modern disk burning programs are also generally happier with 98 than 95 in that this is what they have been optimized for as 98/98se is the prevailing OS platform. No offense intended but I love older PC’s as much as anyone (maybe too much!) but your system is only a few heartbeats away from doorstop status. You can get a system with 2-4x the overall power and resouces for less than $ 500 on an auction site. (some with CDR’s built in!).
As an example from onsale-
K-6 500 mhz HP minitower refurb + 15 gig drive + 4x CDRW + 64 meg RAM + USB + etc etc etc is around $ 490 shipped depending on the auction. See http://www.onsale.com or http://www.bid.com or http://www.ubid.com (among many).
Astro
I am aware that my computer is not cutting edge,state of the art or even mainstream but it was the best machine that I could build(yes I built it from scratch) with the budget I had to work with.
$500 may not be much money to you but it is a sizeable percentage of my monthly take home pay,besides I cannot justifiy pissing off that much money on a machine that is just basicly a toy in my household when I have other bills that need paying,little thing like food and keeping a roof over mine and Ayeshas head.
Before I purchased the drive I made sure that my machine met or exceded the minimum system requirments of the drive and software and have burned over 20 disks in the less than a week that I have had the drive with out burning a coaster yet(knocks on my wooden head)both from an image(deleated afterward) and on the fly(all at the drives max speed of 4x).
Please feel free to continue to post any CONSTRUCTIVE advice that you may have.
Thanks
I never had problems burning CDs reliably on a P200MMX running Windows 3.11. For that matter, my 25 MHz Amiga 3000 Tower never had any probems either. Granted, I was using SCSI CD-Rs, which takes a load off the CPU.
The trick to getting a reliable burn is making sure nothing’s going to interrupt the system while it’s working. Screen savers, TSRs, AOL Instant Messanger, ICQ, and anything else that might steal a clock cycle or two in the background should be quashed.
On the whole, as long as nothing other than the CD-r and the drive holding the image are being accessed, things should go smoothly. (I’ve never had much luck with disc-to-disc copies of any sort, myself, no matter what the system.)
Windchaser
LIONsob, I have a setup like yours & it works. I have the same chipset on one computer. There was a time that the cdrom didn’t show up in system properties but did in the exporer, which was enought for me.
Its most definely a software or bios issue. In the bios, detect HD, it should be set to off for the cdrom, im pretty sure.
Also, you can run MSCONFIG & select to not process the autoexe.bat & config.sys once.
My $.02- When I first bought my CDRW drive, I had to try every frickin’ jumper pin configuration- Master, Slave, Autodetect, swapping places on the chain and retrying all the pin settings again. For some reason, one of the configs that I originally tried and failed worked the second time through- 90 minutes later. The one that worked was hard drive as master, CDR as Autodetect.