disappearing CDROM drives Monday, July 8, 2002 at 6:02 am Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum Posted by Brian (5 messages posted) I was running win98 on a Dell 450MHz machine. I uninstalled adobe acrobat reader and upon rebooting, my machine wouldn't recognize my two installed cdrom drives (one is cd-rw). I found that the only way to get the machine to recognize the drives is to disconnect them from the board (physically) and boot/shutdown, and then reconnect them to the board and boot. Then the pc will recognize the drives and I can access them. The problem is that if I do anything other than immediately shut down the pc, the next I start it, it won't recognize the drives and I have to go through this again. Since it happens with BOTH cdrom drives, I don't think it is the individual drivers. I suspect something with the mscdex file of something that is keeping the machine from recognizing a CDROM drive (no matter how many). I have also installed the win98 SE update and it still does the same thing. I have tried copying another mscdex file from a different CPU; I tried the microsoft knowledge base fix of using "device manager" to look at hard disk ide controllers and setting them to "both"; I have searched the registry for "NOIDE" (nothing there), but still the same thing: If I physically remove the connections, reboot, shutdown, reconnect the drives and reboot; then the machine recognizes the cdrom drives. If I shutdown again and reboot, it still recognizes them, but if I open anything or run a few programs, then shutdown and reboot, then the drive icons (and the drives themselves) do not reappear (on screen as icons and in my computer/explorer). The same is true when booting from the emergency disk: It can find no CDROM controllers. Something is happening that makes the CDROM controllers drop out of the start up loop, but I don't know what? Suggestions please!!! Brian Responses to this message: re: disappearing CDROM drives (Ralph: Monday, July 8, 2002 at 6:16 am) re: disappearing CDROM drives (Everett: Monday, July 8, 2002 at 7:35 pm) All messages in this thread [show all] disappearing CDROM drives (Brian: Mon, Jul 8, 2002, 6:02 am) re: disappearing CDROM drives (Ralph: Mon, Jul 8, 2002, 6:16 am) re: disappearing CDROM drives (Brian: Mon, Jul 8, 2002, 6:42 am) re: disappearing CDROM drives (Everett: Mon, Jul 8, 2002, 7:35 pm) Reply or follow-up to this message Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows 98 Discussion Forum