Windows 95 CD-ROM drive problems

Can you verify that the drive is working correctly (by trying it in another computer)?

Does the board+BIOS allow booting from cd? If yes then you could try using a linux live-cd of you choice and check if the drive is recognized by the kernel and access is possible.

Ah yes, does the corresponding drive letter appear in explorer or is the device only seen in the device manager?

Double Post:

Originally Posted by Sir VG

If BIOS doesn't recognize it, it could cause some issues. Let's just eliminate it as a problem though. (I doubt it is, but it never hurts to check)

When you boot the computer, You'll need to get into setup. Usually it's DEL during POST, but sometimes it's F1, F10, or some other button. See what the computer says. Look to see if BIOS sees the drive. Likely it'll just say CD-ROM or something.

Not really necessary because apparently the drive shows up in the windows device manager and win95 doesn't use the BIOS routines for disc access.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Have you checked the drive with a live-CD yet? If the system can do a boot from cdrom then a least this should work (because cd-booting doesn't depend on any drivers).

Another thing you could do is get yourself some current aspi drivers and isobuster and check if isobuster can access the drive. If it fails then either the drive is screwed up or you've got a driver/compatibility issue.

cya
liquid

There's nowhere I can't reach.

To keep it simple: you should be already through if the live-system loads and the linux init process suceeds. Because that means:
- the BIOS can access the cdrom (thats verified by the boot-from-cd which only loads a small part of the system, mainly kernel + initramfs or something like that)
- as soon as the kernel is loaded the linux cdrom driver kicks in to load the rest of the system (that should happen before the init process) - if this works the drive has no hardware malfunction (or the hw only malfunctions when windows does access it - but I doubt that)

For that, what you want to do, you've to unmount the live-CD - and thats not possible for every live-system I know. So if you want to check other media as well then get a live-CD that features loading the entire data to the RAM (but I want to emphasize: this is not necessary because a succesful boot already tells you about the state of the hardware).

If the process fails and you're sure that the bios/board is capable of cdrom-booting (otherwise this process tells you nothing) then the drive is possibly faulty (I say possibly, because you can never be 100% sure).

If not and everything works then you've got a software problem. Maybe some old msdos-cd drivers are loaded due to config.sys/autoexec.bat - maybe you should check that too. Ah yes, now would be the best thing to try the aspi/isobuster thing I described prior.

How ya doing, buddy?