Drive is locked by a disc utility

hello all...
i recently was given an older computer (with the Windows 98 OS)...and was trying to attempt to use it but cant seem to get the D drive to work...when i insert a disc, an error message comes up and ...and then when i run a Norton scan on the drive a message comes up saying "drive is locked by a disc utility". what does that mean exactly and how can i fix it? it tred rebooting and nothing happens....and i dont want to waste my money and get a new cd rom drive and have it still not work...so any input would be greatly appreciated. thank you for your time.

 

Create a Win98SE boot floppy & boot from it. Choose "with CD-ROM support" when booting. Once booted, you should be at the C:\> prompt. Assuming you only have a single hard drive, your CD drive should be the "E" drive (the boot floppy creates a ramdisk in "D"). Put a CD into your drive, type E: then 'enter' to switch to it & see if you can browse through it in DOS. If it works, then you know it's something in the Win98 installation which is interfering. If it still doesn't work in DOS, then it very likely is defective.

In case you need instructions on creating a boot floppy:

To create a Windows 98 boot diskette, click Start / Settings / Control Panel / double-click the Add Remove programs icon / click the Startup Disk and create disk.

 

thanks alot. i will try this and let you know what happens. assuming that the drive still works, could Norton be the cause of the problem?...thanks.

 

ok i tried that procedure...once i rebooted with the boot disc, i ended up at the A:\> prompt, but i put the cd in and switched to the E drive.... i tried typing a couple things but always ended up with this message-

CDR101 : Not ready reading drive E

does that mean the cd rom drive is bad? once i rebooted again normally i put a disc in and it worked..... ........once....and then i tried it again and again with numerous discs and still got the same error message....if anyone has any ideas let me know. i greatly appreciate it. thank you.

 

Packet writing software locks the drive.

Make sure you don't have InCD or DirectCD (or similar) running in the background.