newbie with cdrom probs

Hi all! I'm trying to fix my mother's computer. She has dementia and I MUST get it fixed asap or she will forget how to use it. It's running Win98SE. It has not been connected to the internet, and it has GoBack 3.0 on it. I'm an intermediate user. Until she could not play her FamilyFinder cds, I had no idea anything was wrong. I brought it home and...

the 1st thing I could see was wrong was the battery. She got into the BIOS while the battery was going bad, but I didn't know if anything was messed up...BIOS is not my forte. (The one thing that IS different in this BIOS from others I've seen is that the hard drive is the primary master and the cdrom is the secondary slave, with no others in between. I assume that's okay because it worked before, but thought I'd throw that in as info.)

I replaced the battery but the cdrom will still not play. It shows up fine in device manager. When I put in a cd, the light remains solidly lit about 5-6 seconds and then goes out. I thought about removing it from the device manager and letting it be recognized again, but didn't want to until someone like you guys tell me it might work.

I will appreciate all your help. sorry so long.

 

Even tho' it shows up in BIOS as 2nd slave, it's no big deal. It should be 2nd master, or primary slave, but as long as nothing else is on the 2nd channel, it should be OK. If you want, go in the case and move the CD's jumper from slave to master (master is all the way to the right side of the jumper block if looking at the back of the drive; slave is the middle of the block; cable select is the left side). Have you tried booting to the CD drive? Any old bootable CD disc will work: your Win98 CD or an XP CD, if you have access to a PC with a CD burner, you can create a bootable disc just to test the drive. If you can boot to a CD, then we know the actual drive is most likely OK, and the problem is software; BUT... it sounds to me like the drive is dying. The quickest things would be to simply replace it with a new one (be sure it's set for master ). A new CDROM shouldn't be over $25 at the local PC store, a used one should be $10 or $15. There's a chance that it just has a dirty lens. A lens cleaner can be purchased anywhere from Radio Shack to Walgreens for about $12.
Good luck!
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