I have read through this forum several times to find a solution to my problem, sadly without success.

I have recently put a fresh install of Win2k on my machine in place of a stable Win98SE. Previously both CD drives worked as expected. Autoplay is off for both data and music, but autoinsert notification is on. The problem occurs everytime I boot the machine. If there are no CD's in either drive, Win2k just refuses to accept anything that I put in the drive. If I try and browse the CD I just get a message pop up telling me to insert a CD into the drive.

If I boot with a CD in either/both drives then the one that had a disk in at boot time will work perfectly, and even after changing disks it still works and will work flawlessly until I reboot without the disks in there. Windows just refuses any attempt at recognising a disk in any of the 2 drives unless a disk was in them at boot time.

I know the drives are in perfect working order as I have checked them in 2 other machines, and they work in Linux which I dual boot into instead of Win2k. This suggests the OS thats at fault. I have checked the cables and replaced them to confirm that they are not to blame, nor are the cables incorrectly seated on the motherboard. Also, any jumpers are correctly set as well. It's driving me nuts trying to figure this out.

The drives are:

Creative 52x CDROM
Yamaha 4416s CDRW on an Adaptec 3940u SCSI card

Cheers for any suggestions

Have u installed VIA4in1 drivers? If not do so and see if that helps at all.

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AMD 1700+ Athlon XP
ASUS A7V133A VIA Motherboard
512MB PC-133 RAM
64MB GeForce 3 Ti200 (Det 27.10)
60GB IBM 7200RPM HardDrive
16x/48x LG DVDDrive
40x Compag CDDrive
16x/10x/40x LiteON ReWriter
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 1024 Player
Creative 4.1 Surround Sound 1600 Speakers
10/100 Netgear Ethernet Adapter
WinTV Primio FM TV/Radio Tuner
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Windows XP Professional Corporate Platinum Edition
Windows XP Plus Pack
Office XP Corporate Edition with Frontpage
Publisher XP Corporate Edition

Yes do that, but ONLY if you have a motherboard using the VIA chipset.

Does W2K find the devices - do they show up in the device manager ?

Have you tinkered with the DMA setting (disabled /enabled). What is it set at ?

Played around in the bios ? Are the CD drives recognized there ?

Sounds weird as you have one SCSI and one IDE drive and both malfunction the same way.

H.

The motherboard I have is a KT7A RAID which has a VIA 686B chipset. The devices both show up in the device manager. Windows sees no problems with the drives. I haven't touched the DMA settings. I am not sure what they are at the moment because I have removed my harddrive with the windows installation for the moment. The bios has no problems with them as I said, if I put a disk in them, it'll boot from it or it will see the disk when Windows starts.

They worked perfectly under Windows 98SE and in 2 other machines, one with 98SE and another with 2k. It is only since I installed 2k this time it has made them stop working properly which suggests it is either a duff setting somewhere or this install just didn't take properly this time.

Interestingly, if I put an audio CD in either drive, the CDPlayer will attempt to find the albums on the internet without success and will play when I press play.

Anything else you need to know, ask away

Cheers,

/Lee