Reveal Sound Card failure and CD drive detection failure

[SufferWell1396]

Ok this is crazy, i have a Colombia (not sure what model) with an intel celeron processor with a Reveal Sound card and a Reveal CD drive.. the cd drive is plugged right into the sound card which is inserted in to my ISA slot... neither are read and i cant get any sound from the computer.. what should i do? :(

[mjc]

Go to the local hardware store and buy a bag of Sakrete...

Seriously, that setup (sound card with proprietary CD drive interface) is not going to be very easy to diagnose. It may be a non Plug and Play ISA card, in which case we'd need to find the documentation for it to see what the jumper settings should be, unless you are real lucky and it has them printed on the card.

Your best bet would be to replace the card with something else (there are plenty of old Sound Blaster cards around...and AWE64 would do nicely) and replace the CD with a standard ATA type...

[SufferWell1396]

Well i dont know, it is a plug and play, everytime i go to the control panel in my Windows 98, i go to detect new hard ware, and it says "searching for new plug and play devices" and it always says the sound card has a problem.. and to fix it they need the Windows 98 CD ROM but MY CD DRIVE ISNT WORKING and it doenst reconize that so i have no idea what to do :confused:

[Sylvander]

I have little doubt that you will find that your PC is capable of booting from a bootable CD, even though the CD-drive won't work when in Windows.
So what you do is...
Boot from the "Emergency Boot CD" [EBCD] [as shown in the link below] and run the "File Manager" [item 2 on the 1st EBCD menu].
You will be asked to ok the mouse & CD drivers and English language.
Then you swap out the EBCD, swap in the Windows CD, and use "File Manager" [item 2 on the 1st menu] [it's an updated version of "Volkov Commander" which is item 1 on the 2nd menu (got to by hitting "Enter" at the 1st menu)], which is running in RAM, to copy the Windows files to a folder on a [FAT32] partition [ideally other than C:] on some internal HDD, and then run the "Setup.exe" file from that location to do a "repair" reinstall, then leave the files there permanently.
Then whenever Windows needs something from those it will fetch it in a blink [you won't ever again have all the trouble your having now].
If that doesn't fix your CD-drive problem [it should], then once booted into Windows, do the driver update in Device Manager and point the wizard at the folder holding the Windows files.

Post #4 in the EBCD thread gives details of how I did this for Win98SE using the older version ["Volkov Commander"] of "File Manager".

1. How to make a free “Smart Boot Manager” floppy
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41498
This makes it easier to boot a chosen drive [particularly the one holding the EBCD]. By using this there is no need to reset the boot priority in the BIOS Setup to make the CD-drive first. If using this then the FDD should be 1st in the boot priority list.

2. How to make a free EBCD bootable CD
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41485
This has a number of useful utilities included including "Image" [for DOS, by Terabyte] & "File Manager".

[SufferWell1396]

but then how would i get the emergency boot CD to boot when windows doesnt read it...? :confused:

[mjc]

Windows never reads somethimg that would boot before and instead of it...

The whole purpose of a bootdisk is to remove Windows from the equation. This is done by using a different OS on the bootdisk, most often some form of DOS.

This will allow for the repair or diagnosis of problems that are nearly impossible to deal with from with in Windows.

[Sylvander]

"but then how would i get the emergency boot CD to boot when windows doesnt read it...?"
I know it seems crazy, but try it and you will see...
Although Windows is unable to control the CD-drive...
The BIOS is able to control it, and the EBCD WILL BOOT.

You would also find that if you booted from a Win9x Startup floppy and loaded the CD-drivers on the floppy...
You would be able to use DOS commands to browse any CD [particularly the Windows installation CD], and USE DOS commands to copy the Windows files from the CD to the HDD.
But I think it's easier to do using "File Manager"; DOS commands can be tricky to get right.