Lost CD drives.

I’ve been sitting around with a broken knee, got board and installed an old game (Commander & Conquer, Red Alert) on my HP Pavilion computer. It loaded and played just fine. But when I exited the game the computer locked up. Alt. Cont. Delete didn’t work, reset didn’t work, had to turn the power off. Waited a few minutes and turned it back on.

Now I have lost both the CD player and CD-Writer, both are original equipment. The red light indicates the hard drive is running all the time. A green light indicates the CD player is running all the time, but does nothing when the eject button is pushed. The CD-Writer light is out and it does eject when the button is pushed. Nether one shows up in My Computer, even when I put a disk in the CD-Writer.

A few years ago I upgraded this pc with a larger hard drive (37 GB), faster CPU (Pentium III running at 864 MHz), 255 RAM, and to Windows ME.

Chipset-Intel 810E, Memory Controller-82810E, IO Controller-82801AA (ICH)

Displaying System Properties shows the following:

Hard disk controllers
Intel 82801AA Bus Master IDE Controller
Primary IDE controller (dual fifo)
Secondary IDE controller (dual fifo) with a yellow exclamation mark.

Removing and reinstalling the driver didn’t work. System restore didn’t work I read someplace to rename the VMM32.VXD file to VMM32.OLD and reboot, generating a new VMM32.VXD file. That didn’t work and I had to use my other computer to make an ME boot disk.

After all that I still have the same error indications. Even tried restore to a point a month before loading the game and it didn’t help a bit. By-the-way there is no viruses or Trojans, the computer has not been connected to the internet for over a year.

None of the original installation disks work, sense it was upgraded. So I am at a loss as what to do next. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

I ran into this problem awhile back. Reboot into safe mode. Check your device manager, you should have your optical drives in there. Open their properties and uncheck the disconnect box then reboot. Your drives should reappear.

In safe mode check the secondary controller to see if it is in resource confilct. If it is marked and there is no obvious problem, remove the controller and let windows redetect on reboot.

Those older games liked to lock driver files or reg keys and if the game crashed they would corrupt the files. Your drive will still work its just Windows being dumb.

 

Dcrypter… That worked. So simple yet so hard??? Thanks a lot.