Old Machine Won't Recognize CD Drive

[geezer]

I am trying to resurrect an old ATX 200MHZ machine out of spare parts
to give to my novice neighbor. It seems to work fine except for the
fact that it will not recognize any of several CDR/CDRW/DVDRW drives I
have. I tried one DVDRW drive that I know for a fact works, and the
machine does not recognize that either.

It shows up nowhere - not in BIOS, not in W98 'My Computer'.

I have tried it as secondary master and as primary slave (there is
only one HDD - primary master). Yes I jumpered it right.

Should I give up, or did I miss something?

Thanks

 

[philo]

I am trying to resurrect an old ATX 200MHZ machine out of spare parts
to give to my novice neighbor. It seems to work fine except for the
fact that it will not recognize any of several CDR/CDRW/DVDRW drives I
have. I tried one DVDRW drive that I know for a fact works, and the
machine does not recognize that either.

It shows up nowhere - not in BIOS, not in W98 'My Computer'.

I have tried it as secondary master and as primary slave (there is
only one HDD - primary master). Yes I jumpered it right.

Should I give up, or did I miss something?

check the jumpers on the HD...
some HD's have a different setting for master with slave present.

 

[Pen]

You need to look into whether the BIOS deals with ATAPI
devices. I seem to recall that early IDE machine's BIOS's
did not
deal with IDE CDRoms.

 

[philo]

You need to look into whether the BIOS deals with ATAPI
devices. I seem to recall that early IDE machine's BIOS's did not
deal with IDE CDRoms.

that's true...
if the bios is just set to "none" the OS should still pickup the CDROM...

try a cd-support bootdisk to see if it can detect one

 

[Pen]

I forgot to mention that you will need to load a device
driver in
config.sys and probably mscdex in your autoexec.bat.
If this is Greek to you, go to bootdisk.com and download a
win98 disk and look at the autoexec and config.sys.