Compaq 1625 no longer recognizes D drive

I'm trying to help my step-son who is out of state and starting college in a couple of weeks. He called last evening to tell me his Compaq 1625 suddenly quit recognizing the "d:" drive. When you insert any CD, he gets the error "drive not ready ".

The operating system is Windows 95 and I did a complete format and reinstall about 3 months ago due to an unrelated problem and it has been working fine ever since.

I'm hoping this will be a relatively simple problem to repair. My first thought was to pop in the 'restore' CD but the problem with the drive would prevent that.

I'll be happy to get specifics on the 1625 (processor, etc.) if anyone replying to this needs it.

Thanks for your help! This site has aided me greatly in the past with my own computer problems.

Mark

 

Try removing and re-inserting the IDE cable.

Samir Talwar

 

If the IDE cables aren't the problem (and I would assume that you will also check the power cable to the CD ROM drive at the same time) you may want to try loading DOS drivers for the CD drive to make sure that there isn't a mechanical problem with the drive itself. One way to do this is to get a Win98 boot disk that will load oakcdrom.sys (a generic ATAPI IDE CDROM driver) which will work with most drives. Before doing that you may want to take a look at the autoexec.bat and config.sys to see if the necessary lines were REM'ed out. Commonly you can remove the "REM" from these lines and have DOS load the required drivers for you. When Windows is installed, these lises have a "REM" installed in front of them so that the Windows drivers can operate the devices. Removing these "REM" from these lines will allow DOS to load the drivers and give you access to the CD ROM drive until you can fix the Windows problem.

Another solution is to locate and download CDGOD55.exe. I think that's' the name of the program. You use it to make a boot disk for Win95 and then try various CD ROM drivers and when you find one that works, it will install them for you. Years ago it was a common and readily available program. I still have a few copies on disk, but I'm sure that it is still available on the 'net with a search.

Good luck and HTH.

Jim Dishaw