i have just downloaded windows media player on to my computer and everything seemed ok. i played a cd on it an all was fine. when i ejected the cd an replaced it with another one it now reads "no cd_rom drives present" i have not been any where near the tower or touched any wires. i dont know anything about computers and was hoping somebody here may be able to give some advice. the computer is a packard bell and it is operating windows 98se. thanks in advance. john

Hello, and Welcome to D-A-L.

What version of WMP did you install?

Is the CDROM still listed in Device Manager? If so highlight and remove/uninstall it. Exit and restart the machine. The hardware detection should run on the next boot and reinstall drivers and reallocate resources for it.

Post back with your answers/results.

not sure what version it was sorry. i have looked on the device managers screen and it is not there. a friend has the disk to reboot so i will try that

I'm not sure what you mean by; "a friend has the disk to reboot so i will try that".

You should not need a (floppy) disk to reboot. I hope that you don't mean restore with a "restore" disk (CD) from another machine because you can seriously mess up your machine unless the machines are identical. As well, these usually format your hard disk resulting in a loss of all data unless it's backed up to another partition first.

You can try a 98SE Bootdisk* to boot the machine with CDROM support to verify if the hardware aspect of the CDROM is OK.

Once you get to the C:\> prompt, you'd place a data CD (Win98 for example) in the CDROM and type dir X: (where X: is the CDROM device letter assigned to the drive for that boot and see if the drive reads the CD. If it does, the problem is not hardware, and the problem is in Windows.

*The above bootdisk image file is a self extracting file and has to be executed (run) from a running Windows(9x) machine in order to create the actual startup diskette on one of your floppy disks. (This image file produces the same bootdisk which 98SE creates.) This downloaded image file will format the floppy disk to ensure its integrity, write the files to the disk, then verify the file write, so it'll take a minute or three to create the bootdisk.

Ensure the floppy drive is set as the first boot device in the bios. http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/23.html

NOTE: When you boot a machine with this boot floppy, it creates a RAMDRIVE in system memory to contain DOS system tools/drivers. Thus it will move your "normal" CDROM device/drive letter "up" one level. (If your CDROM is normally E: it will be F: when booting with this bootdisk.)

The CDROM device letter will be assigned near the end of the floppy boot process, right after MSCDEX is loaded.

thanks for the advice. got the problem fixed not sure what was done to it though

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