bios doesn't find CD-ROM

[brandon12]

I have an old 100 mhz pentium cpu that was working in an old computer. Everything worked when I last tried it, but I recently moved it from my girlfriends house to mine. Now when I turn on the computer it doesn't find the cd-rom drive. I tried 4 different ones that I know work. It won't find it on any ide channel, but it will find a second hard drive with no problem. I have tried every combination (master/slave/cs) on both channels to try and get it to work. If anybody has any suggestions please let me know. I have made sure that the cmos settings are correct.

Thanks,

Brandon

 

[CitrixEngineer]

When you say "it doesn't find the cd-rom drive", where are you looking? By that I mean from within Windows, from an MS-DOS prompt, "Real" DOS, or in the list of devices reported by the BIOS?

My guess would be that, during transit, some of the cable became loose. When you first powered up the PC, it couldn't see the CD-ROM anymore, and just got on with booting without it.

When you re-adjusted the IDE cables, did you go into the BIOS and run the Auto-Detect feature (It's supposed to find nothing!), and then force the ESCD update?

I don't fully understand the logic of doing this, but I've restored many CD-ROMS in old PCs by doing this.

Try booting the machine from a system disk with CD-ROM support, if you have not already done so.

Sadly, old CD-ROMS can also die; I've got 3 or 4 lying around my home workshop that came out of old PCs and I've yet to get working!

I hope this is helpful