Computer problems!

[earth4x]

My uncle called me up this morning and told me he had a problem with his computer and that he needed to reinstall windows. Problem is, he says his CDROM drive doesn't work anymore and that's why he wanted to format.

He's running on a really OLD aptiva 2176-f31 (133mhz with 45mb of ram and a 2mb vid card) so I told him it's probably because the cd-rom was really old and dust finished it off. We go to the store, buy a new one, we go back to his place and I plug the cd-rom in his computer... the result : he doesn't detect it even if it's plugged correctly

Weird thing is, it detects the old broken hard-drive but it doesn't read cds.

I plugged the new drive on the secondary IDE and it didn't detect it, but when I put it on the primary IDE with the hard-drive, it does get detected but I doesn't read the cds!!!!

So basically, I can't reinstall windows95 because we can't run the cd-rom drive and I can't seem to figure out why !!!

the new cd-rom is a LG GCR 8525B (OEM) and the old one is a ACER 52x cdrom. Both plugs on the cd-rom are the same and I know his motherboard supports the standard IDE ports and cables that the newer cd-roms have but I can't figure out why it doesn't work!

any help would be greatly appreciated (don't tell me to buy a new pc, he knows he could but it's his son's pc so he doesn't wanna buy him a new one)

 

[mpasternak]

REEEEK

first Gen Pentium right?

problem here, early pentium boards BIOS's did NOT all support PNP CD-ROMs the majoirty of them required a DOS TSR to be loaded or windows drivers to be specifically installed.

back in the olden days when you baught a CD drive it came with the ATAPI drivers for it.... but these days they don't. no one assumes you need them.

if your bios doesnt support autodetecting CDroms. you may be SOL

 

[fishmahn]

That old of a system probably can't boot from CD's either. Get a Win98 boot diskette (or similar that has CD-ROM drivers) and boot from floppy. Then see if you can access the Win95 CD and reinstall.

Mike.

<font color=blue>Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside the dog its too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx</font color=blue>