Need Help with CD Rom

When I tried to install a new hard drive last week, my windows ME computer stopped seeing my cd-rw drive. It is a Mitsumi CR-4884TE IDE ATAPI drive, and my computer BIOS sees it fine, but windows doesn’t see a thing. When I tried to reinstall ATAPI from a download, the computer asks for my windows ME installation disk - on CD Rom. Catch-22. Help!

Make a directory c:\winme and dump the main directory of the Windows ME CD containing the *.bin files to this directory. It will come in handy for later installs as well. You can point to this directory when asked for Win ME install files.

Double check your master slave jumpering assignments on the back of the drive to make sure there are no conflicts.

Try swapping another drive cable or moving to another IDE channel if you have room.

I would guess that you need to set the HD to master & the cdrom to slave. That’s usually the first thing to check. Also, the position of them on the cable. You should have got instructions with the HD & or the cdrom on this, that explains how to do it.

When hard drives are shipped out, they are normally jumpered as neither master or slave. This set-up works if it’s the only device on the IDE cable. But if there are 2 (like your CD-Rom), then the hard drive needs to be set up as Master and the CD-Rom as Slave.

Pull the hard drive back out, and look at the top. There should be an illustration for how to set up the jumper.

BTW, the jumper is typically a rectangular piece of plastic. It slides over 2 of the metal connectors.

You could also have both the hard drive and the CD-Rom set up as Cable Select. It’s just another jumper setting.