ancient Packard Bell won't recognize CD-ROM drive

I know this type of thing gives true geeks the shivers, but my Dad gave me an OOOOOOLD Packard Bell to keep as an extra puter since it works and has lots of kiddie games on it for the grands. I am fine with that, but cannot get it to boot up. It shows the Win 95 (yes, 95!) screen at the very beginning but then goes (I guess) to DOS or startup, shows the hard drive names, detects the mouse and keyboard; seemed to accept the boot floppies, and t-h-e-n .... "CD-ROM Device Driver ... name =MSCD0001 ... Supporting the following units: Interface board or CD-ROM drive is not ready. Insure that drive power is on and drive cables correctly attached."

Does this mean I need to open the thing up and fiddle with the guts? Or is there some software-y thing I have overlooked due to pure ignorance?

 

Sure looks like you'll need to "fiddle with the guts". I would check the cables, just as the error message suggested. Will the CD-ROM tray open if you hit the button?

 

No, it will not. I have to unplug it and do the ol' paperclip-in-the-keyhole routine.

Now Daddy is saying he wants me to take it to the shop who put in some extra stuff (memory or hard drives or ... whatever) and let them mess with it. Good ol' Dad. Gotta keep the professional geeks in business.

However, I have another old one, a Dell desktop, on which the CD drive quit functioning, and I have never bothered messing with it but I might b/c daughter could use it. So we'll see. The reason we got the laptop I use now was from not wanting to mess with the increasingly erratic desktop anymore(it was about 7 years old so we figured time to upgrade and at the mo we had the cash<G>).

Thanks for the reply, and maybe soon I will make time to look at the Dell -- I bet it was just bad connections, dust, undone cable, or suchlike.

 

Honestly, I hope you can convince your father that the old Packard Bell is not worth taking to a shop and spending money on it. I still have a Packard Bell computer probably about the same age as yours. Mine is a Legend 406CD. It originally had a 75MHz Pentium CPU, Windows 95, only 8MB of RAM, and an 850MB hard drive. During the years I used it as my main computer, I upgraded it with a 200MHz overdrive processer, maxed out RAM at 128MB, the last hard drive installed was a 15.3GB 7200 rpm drive, and I installed PCI video card to replace the onboard video. I also upgraded the OS to Win 98SE.

I still have it but, believe, I don't enjoy using it when I occasionally - now, rarely - start it. It will probably go to a local computer recycling drive soon.

If your father can't be talked out of this, I suggest just looking for some more RAM for it on ebay (memory type is 72-pin EDO) and a used CD-ROM drive.

But, again, taking that thing to shop and perhaps spending $200 or more is going to be an absolute waste of money. If you shop around, you can get a new desktop for $400 or less.

 

I appreciate your concern and have actually tried to get him to understand this concept ... but a guy with a PhD in Logic is not always on the same mental plane ("mental plane"? hah! "same universe") as the rest of us drones. Besides, he likes the computer repair dudes and they were the ones who added the extra stuff (hard drive or memory, I am still fuzzy on that but it had 2.1G hard drive and only 38mb RAM so probably 2 more units of memory) so he feels like he wants to give the ol' cpu new life. I agree that a cheapie laptop would be nice, but he has all this (95-compatible) software and How-To books, etc. So hey I'll let him spend his money because I can't talk him out of it. Beats hiring a lap dancer for a birthday party or something -- which is not his style.

But thank you for answering. I will probably try to tackle the old Dell for the daughter & grandson at some point, and will come running here when I get stumped. If I can't do that one myself, it will get posted on Freecycle as there are always local folks wanting old puters for purposes of tinkering and/or cannibalization.

Cheers!