My CD/DVD is gone from My Computer in Windows 98SE

I looked at the thread posted by Drewzer03 in Mar 2004, but his OS is XP so it did not seem that the Microsoft link applied. I have a network with three computers running on ASUS A7N8X2 Mb's. One is using Windows ME and the other two use Windows 98SE. On one of the Windows 98SE machines, much like Drewzer03, one day the DVD was there and working fine, the next day I heard the spin-up but nothing on the screen. I clicked on My Computer and there was no CD/DVD. I have been fighting this problem on my own for over 3 months - I am holding down 4 jobs trying to make ends meet, since a layoff back in 2002, so I don't get a lot of key time here. The other two machines have working CD/DVD's so I am not dead in the water, but I really need to get this problem fixed - I use this machine for a lot of things and don't want to have to move my programs over to the other machines just to use the DVD and I can't load anything new now that uses a CD. I feel the root of my problem may be the hard drive controller. Under Device Manager I have "!" next to Primary IDE controller and Secondary IDE controller - Standard Dual PCI IDE is OK. I have tried to remove and let the machine re-install, which requires removing the Standard Dual to do that, but each time it comes back the same way. If I look at the properties for the Primary and Secondary they show the same error message: "This device is either not present, not working properly [surprise, surprise!], or soes not have all the drivers installed (Code 10)". When I try to update the drivers, it always tells me the best driver is already installed and will not let me do anything else. There are no resource conflicts shown. They all use 1.47 gig AMD Athlon XP's, and this machine has 256 Meg memory and runs on Windows 98SE (build 4.10.2222) - all are home built. Sure would like to get my sick one up and going again. Thanks for any help.

 

Hi,

The same thing just happened to me with a cd drive on my 98 machine and it was the ribbon cable tried another and problem fixed. So try the cable first. Could be the drive though, you would have to test it on another ide channel or machine. If neither one of these then bad controller.

Rick