PC help please?

[keith888]

Hi guys,

I know there are lots of PC experts in the club so would appreciate some advice!

The eldest lads PC (XP home) will no longer show a DVD/CD drive. The drives show up fine in BIOS but do not appear when booted up. The PC will also not boot up on the CD/DVD when a bootable CD is inserted (BIOS set to CD boot first). I've done the following;

1. Substituted a known working drive - no difference
2. Substituted another IDE lead - no difference
3. Swapped the power lead and confimed 12V and 5V feed - no difference
4. Rolled the PC back to an earlier restore point - no difference

Based on the above, I am assuming its a hardware fault somewhere on the motherboard but I really don't want to have to completely rebuild the PC unless my conclusion is correct (especially as the blasted thing only came with a backup disk image and not install disks). Any thing else I can check?

Thanks,

Keith

[JPM]

Can you see the drive in device manager? Does it have a drive letter assigned?

The CD/DVD's you're trying to boot to are they bootable?

[keith888]

No, Nothing in device manager and no drive letter assigned. I confirmed the bootable CD booted fine in this PC but no joy in the lads one (it ran up briefly but then reverted to booting off the hard drive).

Keith

[moozaad]

Keith I think your original guess was correct and that the motherboard maybe at fault as you have eliminated other items by swapping them out.
I may suggest you check all the pins are present on the motherboard side, but other than that you're stuck with either a new motherboard or a USB CD drive.

On the brightside, if you swap the motherboard like-for-like then you shouldn't need to reinstall. The model number and make will be printed on the motherboard somewhere.


You could also try clearing the bios as it maybe disabled somewhere in there or maybe the settings are corrupt but that shouldn't affect windows as it doesn't use the bios system to access hardware.
Load factory settings or similar should do it, or to be thorough try pulling the power cable out and removing the button battery (there's also a jumper, normally #12 or 14 which is the same as pulling the battery)

EDIT: it may also be the PSU - power issues can cause all sorts of random errors, try unplugging the HDD or other items.
You could also try plugging the CD into the IDE port that the HDD normally uses to see if it works there, if it does then you know it's just the second IDE port.

[Lightning Boy]

First port of call will be to search for mscd.exe........ if not...... re-install from disk, i.e copy from OS CD to floppy as part of a boot disk..... yes..... the old floppys still have their uses.

[keith888]

Some good ideas of things to try there! Alas, the blasted thing doesn't even have a floppy drive though I can borrow a USB one from work. Swapping IDE ports is easy to try so I'll also try that tonight. I don't think its the power supply as I already tried booting with hard drive disconnected and it made no difference though I have previous experience on how many odd symptoms these things can cause when they start to go wrong.

Using a USB CD/DVD drive is something that didn't occur to me so is certainly worth considering if it is the motherboard and I cannot get the same model.

Thanks a lot!!

Keith