Woe is my computer -- please help

Factual Questions
1

First of all, I apologize for asking a computer question here. I try to keep my posts to the SDMB to more general-interest type stuff, but I don’t know where else to turn with this problem.

Short problem: My computer won’t read anything from the CD-ROM drive.

Long Problem: I have a Packard-Bell (1997 BIOS date) running Windows 95. It uses a Pentium 166Mhz processor with MMX Technology. It has only 24MB RAM and a 3.0GB harddrive. Okay, I know you’re jealous of my little speed-demon ;).

Anyway, through years of use, the entire HD is clogged up. It has maybe 250MB free. As a result, the machine runs terribly slow, especially when launching apps. I have attempted to reclaim space by using such things as McAfee’s Nut’s and Bolts. Oddly, even as it removed unneeded items, relatively little drive space was actually recovered. I have also defragged the drive using McAfee. It took over eight hours to get done.

Now, the computer will not read any data CD’s at all. It does, however, play audio CD’s. Therefore, I feel confident that, physically, the CD-ROM drive is okay. Somehow, I must have lost whatever software is needed to read data disks.

According to the system docs, there is no driver needed for the CD-ROM drive. The CD-ROM does show up in “My Computer”, but it won’t identify any disks in it. It says “Device not ready” and asks to retry. The disks do not run from auto-insert or from Start/Run . I have tried several disks and I have made sure that they are free of fingerprints or other defects. I have also used all of the system diagnostics included with the computer or with McAfee. They all either say there’s no problem, or they can’t find the problem.

What I would like to do is re-initialize the system. I want to restore the entire computer from the master CD. Unfortunately, even when the computer is booted from the System Disk (located in the 3.5" drive), it won’t find the software on the CD. It insists that the disk is not there.

So, do any of you have an idea about how I can get my computer to straighten up and fly right. It’s getting to be tax-time soon, and I want to be able to load up TurboTax. I’ve also got some other software I need to install.

Thanks for your time in wading through this entirely too long post.

2

**The CD-ROM does show up in “My Computer”, but it won’t identify any disks in it. It says “Device not ready” and asks to retry. **

I hate to be the one to bring this up, but when that happened to me, the culprit was a defective CD-ROM drive. The fact that your computer can’t access CD-ROMs even when booted from the system floppy is another sign that it’s the hardware that’s the problem.

I’m afraid that the relevant rule of thumb here is “if it moves, it breaks”, and CD-ROM drives have plenty of moving parts.

3

Could be the fact that it plays music CD’s is false reassurance. On my old clunker, the CD has an extra little wire that goes straight to the sound card, hence music. Might it be that that wire is firm, but the other connection, like to the jomamma board, is loose? And, when you reboot, does it list the CD drive as one of the devices that CONFIG.SYS is feeding? Lots of those utility programs can play fast and loose with your autoexec.bat and config.sys.

Have you sacrificed a chicken to Cthulu? Donated $5 to the Microsoft Legal Defense Fund?

4

Could be the fact that it plays music CD’s is false reassurance. On my old clunker, the CD has an extra little wire that goes straight to the sound card, hence music. Might it be that that wire is firm, but the other connection, like to the jomamma board, is loose? And, when you reboot, does it list the CD drive as one of the devices that CONFIG.SYS is feeding? Lots of those utility programs can play fast and loose with your autoexec.bat and config.sys.

Have you sacrificed a chicken to Cthulu? Donated $5 to the Microsoft Legal Defense Fund?

5

First guess would be that the drive is hosed. if it won’t even read the cd after booting off a floppy, its hardware. Period.

Good news is that cd drives are cheap, and pretty easy to install. And turbo tax is available online, so you dont even have to load it on your machine, just do your taxes on thier web page, pay a fee, and they send them in for you.

6

As others have indicated hardware CD drive failure (specifically drive electronics) is most likely possibility,however, it might be worthwhile to unplug and reseat cables just in case. CD audio bypasses the IDE interface and simply pumps analog datastream out to soundcard which is why it still works.

7

Windows 95 doesn’t put the cd rom drives on the boot disk. You have to added them yourself, or the boot disk will never have cdrom support. You have the load the dos drivers for the cdrom onto the floppy, and edit two files.

autoexec.bat must contain
LH A:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD000 /M:12 /L:E

config.sys must contain
DEVICE=A:\HIMEM.SYS
devicehigh=A:\CDROM.SYS /D:MSCD000

The files must also be on the floppy.

8

I have found Nuts & Bolts had many functions that would lock the computer. The program will also try too optimize the system and mess things up good. I’m going to email you five files to put on a newly made Win95 boot disk. Copy the files to the boot disk, and overwrite any that are duplicates. You should have access to the cdrom drive with the floppy then.

9

Thanks to everyone who has replied. I hate to treat this board as some sort of computer-support line, but I didn’t know where else to try.

Next weekend, I will check to make sure all connections to/from the CD drive are snug. If that still doesn’t help, then I’ll try Phobia’s files on a boot disk (thanks – truly above and beyond the call of duty). If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll have to try a new drive or reconcile myself to the fact that my 'pooter is nothing more than a boat-anchor.

10

The fact that it can read music cds seems to me that its working right.

11

If it doesn’t turn out to be the hard drive, the problem might be really hard to diagnose, because win95 can get really wierd. If it really has been running for a couple years, with lots of programs added and removed, the registry can get so such modification that it eventually gets strangely fubared. I once had a win 95 vsystem that had been running for 2 years freak out so the CD was unable to recognize any file that was under two Meg and started with the letter S (which made it really hard to run a setup.exe) Another friend had a system that was unable to see any file that contained both an ‘H’ and a ‘Z’. Once it gets to that point scanreg and the various reg fixers don’t do crap, so the only option is blank and reinstall.