Intermittent CD/ROM Operations

[valephor]

I just bought this new 56X CD-ROM drive because I thought that the old one was no good. The tray ejects and I have put in several discs to test it. There is no drive light to access it and I get a "drive not ready message". The auto insertion option is on under drive properties and so is the disconnect option. There is power to the drive because when the tray ejects, the green light comes on. I have Win 98 2nd, 224 MB ram, 500 mhz Celeron. I recently installed nero 5.5.10.42 because my Plextor drive came with Roxio Easy CD creator. My 56X drive is F: and my plextor is G:. I have NO problems with the Plextor. Please help.

[Shades Coolray]

There could be many things causing this little problem. You say that both "auto insert" and "disconnect" are checked in the CD-ROM properties, but you didn't mention DMA, that should be checked too. That is usually the most obvious thing wrong, but it could also be that Roxio is interfering with Nero, so you may want to uninstall one program to see if that changes anything. Also, did you check the jumper on the new CD-ROM to see if it was set to master, slave, or cable select before you installed it? Anyway, I hope one of my solutions helps.

(by the way your computer sounds similar to mine: I have 98SE, 256mb of RAM, and a 600mhz Celeron.)

[Shades Coolray]

I just remembered something, if you have both CD drives on the same IDE channel, on the CDROM you should actually disable "auto insert" because Nero hates when you have it on for both drives. Also, if you haven't tried already, you can removed the CDROM in device manager, and then reinstall it to see if that helps. Then if that still doesn't fix it, update the drivers and firmware. If all that stuff doesn't work, the laser thing inside the drive could be misaligned, in which case you'll have to get a new drive.