hello everyone; I’ve got a question about a problem with my drives.
I get this message when i start up, on the very first screen (still in DOS):
neither the A drive nor the D drive will work. what’s the deal? how do i fix the drivers? I’m pretty sure it’s a driver problem.
jb
allow me to elaborate. i downloaded the driver for the cd-rom and installed it, but no fix.
i can’t do anything from my windows cds, for obvious reasons. any ideas on what the prolem may be?
thanks,
jb
That’s the BIOS telling you that the disk is munged, long before any software driver ever gets involved. You don’t have a driver problem. You’ve got a hardware problem. Possibly two problems, since the CD rom is likely an IDE drive and the floppy is,well, a floppy drive (2 different interfaces). If they both broke at the same time I’m guessing the controller chip on the motherboard is the part that’s gone south.
You might also want to check that your floppy drive cable is correctly seated and polarized. Also double check that your CD drive is set to the correct master-slave jumper setting. If it is sharing the hard drive cable set it to slave. If on it’s own cable by itself set to master or single jumper setting.
this is my family’s computer, not mine. so i don’t know if both drives spanked out at the same time.
i am going to try the cable thing. thanks.
jb
A possible cause of your CD-ROM drive problem is you forgot to install MSCDEX, the extension for MS-DOS to run CD-ROM drives.
it seems as if there is no autoexec.bat. as in, like, totally missing. not even there but empty. i know this doesn’t bear on my drive problems (the error comes up way before autoexec would start), but it’s still weird.
jb
Autoexec.bat and config.sys are optional files on windows systems. MSCDEX is only needed if you boot the machine up in DOS.
The interesting thing about the CD rom is that the BIOS can read the drive type, then reports some type of error. When I look at it again, now I think the word “ERROR” is associated with the floppy, not the CD roms. You might try disabling the floppy in the BIOS and see if it boots without an error. If that works, then most likely it is a driver problem of some sort as far as the CD drives are concerned.
The floppy drive definately has a hardware problem. Check the power cable to the drive, and check the data cable to the drive (note if the data cable is inverted, the drive light will stay on all the time). If that all seems ok, then replace the drive.
after cleaning the computer inside and out, and checking the connections, i restart.
still no D: disk. every time i try to access my cd drive, i get a message “D: Drive Error: Cancel, Retry”.
but a funny thing has become afoot. if i pop a music cd into the drive, and AOL is running, then AOL Media Player loads the cd and plays it successfully.
and then, from Windows, i can open cd-rom’s with absolutely no problem.
the hell?
jb