Ran into an interesting problem while working on an old notebook computer. I was attempting to load network card drivers from CD-ROM and was unable to do so. When I checked out the CD, it appeared that Windows 98 was incorrectly identifying it as an audio CD. I tried the disc on another PC and was able to read it without any problems.
What could cause this to happen? I was using this same laptop about a month or so ago and was playing Quake without any problems. Could this be caused by an older version of MSCDEX being loaded, or should I be looking for something else? I’ve tried deleting the CD-ROM from the hardware manager and letting it be re-detected, but that doesn’t do the trick. This is a UMAX laptop, and therefore doesn’t have any new or updated drivers.
I thought the same thing at first, but I was able to read the C-ROM successfully on another PC. I also tried my original Windows 98 CD and got the same result. i guess there’s the possibility that the CD-ROM lens is dirty.
If you can put a floppy drive in the notebook at the same time as the CD-ROM then there’s something you can try to narrow down the problem. Create a Win98 boot floppy from Start|Settings|Control Panel|Add/Remove Programs, then boot to it and select the option for CD-ROM support. Try to access the CD-ROM’s drive letter from DOS. If you can read data from it then something in Windows is causing the problem. If not then it’s likely a hardware issue.
I’ve had that problem copying a cd when I didn’t have quite enough resources to make a good copy but enough so that the program didn’t crash. I have also had good cds read as audio when I didn’t have enough resources available to read properly. I don’t understand why or how it happened but when I rebooted, I saw the cd correctly… the one that copied as audio stayed audio though.
Hope that helps… and if someone can tell me how and why that happened to me… other than my computer being inhabited by a nasty poltergeist that is…
