Member Avatar for Vasago

I have no sound card in my old comp im putting back together..Do I have to have one in order to make the CD-Rom work? I dont have an extra one to put in it or the $$ to go buy one at the moment. If there is any way around it i need a way to use the cd-rom

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by caperjack

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Member Avatar for Slade

I have no sound card in my old comp im putting back together..Do I have to have one in order to make the CD-Rom work? I dont have an extra one to put in it or the $$ to go buy one at the moment. If there is any way around it i need a way to use the cd-rom

You don't need a sound card to run the cd-rom drive, why? Doesn't the drive work?

Member Avatar for Vasago

no..and its not recognizing the drive either..tells me its not plugged in on both cd-roms ive tried

Member Avatar for Slade

so, you've tried inserting a cd and it tells you the hard drive isn't plugged in is that it?

Member Avatar for Vasago

that or when i dbl click the desktop cr-rom icon..it wont let me access it. Its all hooked up to as far a i can tell and both CD-ROMS i have work

Member Avatar for Slade

ah... you're spinning me out here. What can you see when you go to my computer?

Member Avatar for Vasago

It has all my drives listed,floppy drive and my cd-rom drive..but when i click the cd-rom it says " O:\is not accessable..the device is not ready". O is my CD-ROM

Member Avatar for Slade

you being able to see it means it was connected properly... hmm is it on a channel by itself? If so make sure it is the master drive, if it is on an IDE channel with another cd-drive, you must make one master and one slave, if it is on an IDE channel with a hard drive, I would suggest making the cd-rom slave and the hard drive master... Although windows detecting it makes me believe there is no issue there. Perhaps the cd-rom is broken? Are you certain it's working properly?

Member Avatar for Vasago

Honestly Im not sure what all that means..im not very comp litterate about things like that..all i know is i have 2 hard drives and a floppy and a cd-rom in this comp. Would be so much easier to do this if you were able to see it yourself. Thats the downfall of being comp illiterate

Member Avatar for Puckdropper

Don't get discouraged yet Vasago. Pay attention to what we say, and read everything about computers you can get your hands on. If you take the time to remember the information you read, you will get to be computer literate. (What drives me nuts about most users is they don't pay enough attention the first time to remember how to do the simpleist of things.)

You know what the basic parts of the computer are, and that's a good start. Describe to us how the data cables (and not the power cables) are routed.

Is it:
Floppy Drive: 1 connector to motherboard, the others are "floating free"
Hard Drive: 1 connector to each hard drive, one on the motherboard
CD-ROM Drive: 1 connector to motherboard

or are the first hard drive and CD-ROM drive on the same cable?

Member Avatar for caperjack

I have no sound card in my old comp im putting back together..Do I have to have one in order to make the CD-Rom work? I dont have an extra one to put in it or the $$ to go buy one at the moment. If there is any way around it i need a way to use the cd-rom

After you get it all sorted out let me know where you live i maybe able to send you a soundcard ,no charge ,if it not half way around the world

Member Avatar for Vasago

ok..here is how the cables are connected:

Floppy: One connector to floppy and one connector to mother board (not connected to anything else except power)

Dual hard drives: One connector to each hard drive and other connector to motherboard

CD-ROM: One connector to CD-ROM and one connector to motherboard (no sound cable connected,have no card to connect to and connected to nothing else but power )

Both my CD-ROM's I have tried have the pins set to master. Both have power when turned on and doors open,but I get a message when I try to dbl click the cd-rom icon that says " O:\is not accessable..the device is not ready". O is my CD-Rom.
Also I dont know alot about BIOS and how the settings are supposed to be for this system or any other. Basically thats all i can tell you about this system except for
Its a Pent 1 200mhz processor ,128megs SDRAM, 3D Blaster Banshee(16 bit i think)Graphics card, Mitsumi 12x/24x CD-ROM, 2gig and 8gig harddrives, and WIN 98 SE operating system on it. I bought the system a few years ago from a friend. All I want to do is get it up and running so my mother has something to learn the basics about computers.

BTW CaperJack..I live in Florida :)

Member Avatar for caperjack

you could try this ,right click on mycomputer /properties/device manager click the + next to cdroms and remove them and reboot computer to reload the drivers for them ,also you could go in to the BIOS and go to the detect hard drive section and click Y for each drive it detects.
Florida AH! not that far away actuall I live on the East coast of Canada[not toronto The Real east coast Nova Scotia ]

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