Win98 SE won't recognise CD ROM drive

I have just upgraded a friend's W95 machine to Win98 SE. I used the CD ROM drive to conduct the installation and it proceeded OK. At some point, late in the installation, I was requested to insert the Win98 CD. However it had lost recognition of the CD ROM drive! There had been NO hardware modifications whatsoever. I cancelled the request and the installation completed - apparantly successfully. I was able to run programs already installed on the machine (Word etc), and able to dial up the internet which worked OK. But the machine would not recognise the CD ROM drive, despite having just loaded Win 98 from it!!

The computer is a fairly old HP Vectra. I looked in the BIOS but couldn't find an obvious fault - besides which, just installing an operating system would not affect the BIOS settings.

Fortunately my friend does not use the CD ROM drive much, but I would like to solve the problem (for his daughter!!)

Any ideas?

Dave Skye

It would appear the win95 drivers don't work with win98 - so, go to device manager and look see if the cd shows there - if so, remove it.

Then reboot and see if it auto-detects.

A 'Clean Install' is always 'bestist' in terms of least bother & unexpected 'strangeness' ;)..

My guess would be 'left over items' in either autoexec.bat or config.sys interfering from the 'old' 95 install & those trying to load a real mode driver for the cd, whilst 98se doesn't need that generally, as windows from 'then on' uses its own 'generic' (one size fits almost all) drivers for cd operation.

So you might need to fire up notepad or whatever & do some mannual edits of these two files...

In autoexec.bat you are looking for a line like so;-
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD000 /L:E
& in config.sys perhaps maybe something like;-
DEVICEHIGH=C:\WINDOWS\TOSHIBA.SYS /D:MSCD000 /N:1 /P:220
(note the bits in bold can be anything you like, or somebody else liked, & that's why 'upgrade' can't sort it)
Find these lines & add 'rem' at the start of them (which makes windows ignore them, but if you want them back, means you can just edit out the 'rem' bit again).

& welcome to the forums Dave :).