CD-ROM "disappeared"

[LuDaCriS66]

I've got a friend whose got an ancient IBM Aptiva and about a month ago, the CD-ROM simply stopped working... well, at least it's not being detected by Win98. One night, she could use it and the next, it's not showing up in My Computer. I tried going into the BIOS... but it being an IBM BIOS, it wasn't really informative and useful. I wasn't able to test it with a boot disk at the time because her floppy drive didn't work either.. hehe.. the drive can still open up and the status light will still flicker on and off..
is it safe to say it's dead?

 

[blackhawk]

+Maybe dead but could be a dead cable. Try that first if you got another one. You should be able to boot from a floppy, enable in bios first then try to access drive.

 

[LuDaCriS66]

Originally posted by: blackhawk
+Maybe dead but could be a dead cable. Try that first if you got another one. You should be able to boot from a floppy, enable in bios first then try to access drive.

Hmm, I actually replaced both the drive and cable.. one by one at first and it still didn't work. I guess its gotta be something to do with the motherboard... it's hard to determine though because of how this Aptiva is layed out.... the tower is seperate from the floppy drive and CD drive.. they're located in a base under the monitor.

 

[bacillus]

are there any exclaimation marks in device manager?
under performance is it using compatibility mode?
some viruses can do this sort of thing as well so an uptodate viral scan should be scheduled now!

 

[Buk]

Try a spare HD in place of the CDROM. If it doesn't recognize it, the IDE channel might be bad.

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

I've had this happen when packet writing software is installed. For example, Roxio DirecCD or Nero's InCD. Do a google search on hifilter. Even after uninstalling the software, you need to go in and delete a couple of registry entries. If this is your problem, then fix up the registry, reboot and your drives will reappear.