CD-ROM 'not ready'

[robertoluna]

A family member gave me a PC she no longer wanted--it has "issues." One of them is that the CD-ROM stopped working some time ago. Of course, the machine has no paperwork and I know very little about its history.

The machine has Win98, and the CD-ROM shows up in Explorer and My Computer as drive D. There are no errors under Device Manager. However, when you try to access the disk, Windows says "Device is not ready."

The CD-ROM is a CyberDrive, and it has power (lights blink when you insert a disk). I tried reinstalling the standard driver that was on the machine (I can't get it to read my Win 98 CD to see if there is a newer driver).

I looked through autoexec.bat, config.sys, and windows system files, but I don't really know what those should look like.

The Cyberdrive site says "if Windows recognizes the drive and it still doesn't work it is a Windows or motherboard problem" and they provide no other help. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Bob

[rhconley]

It sounds like your drive is dead. CD-ROM drives are cheap...get a new one. Save the receipt and return it if it doesn't fix the problem.