I have a basic questions to ask. How does one reinstall cdrw software on a cd drive if the drive can not be seen by the system? See below for everything I have tried.

I installed an older version of an encyclopedia (Eyewitness series)on my daughters computer for some school stuff. The install went fine and we work on the project using this software that night. The very next day we went to use the computer again and the cd drive is not found by the system. Normally an icon is present in the system tray and now it has an x in it(windows explorer does not find it either, the diagnostic software for the cdrw says it is not installed). I have a HP CD Writer plus with Adaptec software. The encyclopedia software must have overwrote something for the cdrw, but I can't find it. I have tried the following with no sucess.

- Verified that the cdrom drive operates by inserting the win98se cdrom and letting it boot up with cdrom help. It works. If I try to swap out the win98 disc with the cdrom driver disk I get an error message.
- I deleted the cdrom drive from device manager (in safe mode) and rebooted. The drive did not show up.
- Verified that the drive is not in MSDOS compatible mode in system properties.
- In bios made sure that the type is cdrom not autoconfigure (actually tried both, no difference).
- Ran system file checker, reported nothing!
- Removed all non essential things from the system tray, still no go.

I can uninstall the software(Adaptec directCD, CD Creator, CD Writer plus), but will the system see the drive after the uninstall? When I removed the CD Creator from the system tray, the system still did not see the drive. I am totally out of ideas. Thanks for any an all help.

This doesn't add up!!....In Control Panel/System/Device Mgr....how many cd rom's show up? Do you have a regular CD rom too? If it will read the Win98 cd and nothing else.....that's downright nutzo...are you saying that it will read the win98 cd but at the same time it isnt showing up in My Computer as a drive? Try going to Properties in My Computer and "arranging icons by drive letter".....still no cd drive?

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"As hard as a rock & dumb as a brick"...Windows CEMeNT

Your are correct, this is nutso. The computer only has one cdrw drive which shows up in device manager as working properly. The drive is working and to show that this is not a problem with a cable or the drive I included the part about the win disk. If I boot with the win98se disk in the drive, and use cdrom help, I can see the contents of the win98 disk. I had hoped to use the win98 disk to get the cdrw drive up and going and then reinstall the drivers. However if I swap out the disk, I get an error message. I therefore do not know how to reinstall the drivers without a working drive.

If it shows up in Device Manager as working then check and see if DMA is enabled on it, if it is try unchecking to disable DMA on the CD-RW, some combos of drives and Adaptec software don't like DMA too well.

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mjc
To ME or NOT to ME....

This was way too easy, just a check and all seems well. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.