cd rom drive not accessible

[SkidSolo]

Up until a few days ago it was fine then intermittent readings of cd's and now nothing at all.

I have an old Gateway G5-233 running Win95.

The only other thing I've noticed is music only comes through the earphones and no longer through the speakers either. I've also got a cleaner which did nothing.

It just says the E:/ is not accessible and is not ready.

Also, I have MS Flight Sim 2002 Professional running on the old mans machine which is a couple of months old but it doesn't have a video card. It seems okay to me but would a video card make all the difference?

Any advice? Ta.

Rgds
SS

[newswatcher]

Have you "fiddled" with the IDE plugs? With power off (better to be safe) re-position the plugs at the back of the PC. Are you "brave" enough to swap the hard drive and CD cables, to see if the fault "shifts"?

What do the device settings say?

Double Click the "My computer" on the desktop
Double Click the "Control Panel"
Double click the "System" icon
Click on the "Device Manager" tab on the top of the screen, the System Properties window will be displayed

If there are any problems with the drive a Yellow Exclamation point will be shown in front of the "+CD ROM" entry on the device manager window.

Click on the + sign in front of the "+CD ROM". This will open the CD-ROM section and show you the drive name that windows has detected. Click on the name so it is highlighted (blue) and press the properties button on the bottom of the screen. The CD ROM properties window will be displayed. There are at a minimum 2 tabs on the top of the screen. The General and the Settings.

When the General tab is pressed the "Device status" will be shown in the middle of the screen. This should normally say "This device is working properly".

When the Settings tab is pressed, you will see specific information for that drive. The assigned drive number is located here.

Good luck!

[Saab Dastard]

When you say you get music thru the earphones, not speakers:

a) can you still, reliably, listen to music? - indicates that the CD transport and DAC are operational, and also power is not an issue.

b) do you start the CD playing with a play button on the drive itself or by using software, e.g. Accessories, CD Player?.

I would suspect the IDE cable, either where it connects to the CD drive, or on the mobo (unless both hdd and cd are on the primary, in which case just at the CD drive). Or, of course, it could be the secondary IDE controller has packed in.

I'm not saying it is impossible, but I have never come across a CD player that could play music CDs but not data CDs.

Of course, it could be a software driver problem - have you installed any hardware or software co-incident with the problem starting? Although driver problems are rarely intermittent or gradually get worse - they tend to be works / doesn't work problems.

Having said all that, a P II 233 and Win 95? I still have an old Tosh laptop that's a similar spec. and despite the limitations of memory (160 MB), graphics, hdd etc. it can still run Win2K (has done for about 4 years now), but with recent apps like Office 2K it was really running like a dog. If you can afford to, think of upgrading to a newer PC (don't even think of trying to upgrade the existing) and OS. Have a look at the Dell outlet site.

SD

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

SkidSolo,

With Win95 most Optical Drives were not native to the OS. Win95 was also notorious for corrupting drivers. You could try deleting the CD-ROM in the Device Manager and reboot to see if it reloads the drivers for you. If that does not work, it might be time to download the CD-ROM Drivers off the net and install them again.

That should fix the problem.

Take Care,

Richard

[SkidSolo]

Thanks for the suggestions. The goalposts are moving tho.

It will read cdrom's with games on it but will not read a cdrom that has been prepared for me e.g. one that has been written with manuals from company etc.

Is there something about writing a track on the cdrom that displays its info? Is it a FAT? I can only presume it can't read them it used to display "JAR OPS E:/" etc but not now.

It says the device is working properly. I haven't deleted the driver as I'm beginning to wonder if its the cd's but they are readable on other machines.

Will persevere.

SS

[Saab Dastard]

Ah!

It sounds to me as if your old CD-Rom drive is capable of reading single session (closed) CDs but not multi-session CDs. Try getting the person who is writing the CD to close the session and the CD when they are writing the CD.

Alternatively, buy a new CD drive that can read multisession CDs.

SD