BIOS will not recognize CDROM

[siituser]

I got my hands on a PII 300 and formated the HD. I booted from a Win98 Boot Disk and loaded with CDROM support. The CD mounted to E: but would not ready any cds (made an aweful grinding sound) so I swapped the CD-ROM with another.
Now the BIOS (Phoenix 4.0 Release 6.0) will not recognize the CD-ROM. The CD is on the second IDE channel and I've tried all jumper settings - The BIOS keeps reverting to NONE in the selection menu. I've tried going back to the old one just to start it up but it won't get recognized either.

The box is a NEC Ready...

Any ideas on how to get thge CD working?

 

[franklin97355]

Some BIOSes don't recognize the CDRoms. If you boot with the boot disk does it work then?

 

[siituser]

No, it doesn't - During the boot it finds everything upto the HD and flashes something about an error message. From the Win98 floppy, with CD support it tries to install the ATAPI CD-ROM driver and says "No drives found, aborting installation"

I've also tried different boot disks. Seems to be something at the BIOS level.

 

[Blujacket]

Try setting the BIOS IDE drive list to None/Not Installed for all but the hard drive and see if it works. A lot of BIOS versions don't need to have a setting/autodetect for the CD.

 

[siituser]

hey Blujacket,

I turned:
Primary Slave to None (was Auto)
Secondary Master was set None (and always seems to revert back even when I save a new selection)
Seconday Slave to None (was Auto)

I've confirmed that jumpers on CD are set to Master and I'm connected to the secondary Master IDE cable.

Still nothing...

 

[siituser]

well, if all else fails - change IDE cables!!! New cable worked like a charm.

Thanks to both Franklin and Blujacket for their timely repsonses.

 

[Tom11]

siituser;
Just a thought or two. If we assume that the BIOS and motherboard are OK (since they recognized the first CD), and we assume that the second CD is jumpered correctly, that would leave us with a several possibilities, and I apologize if they sound simplistic, but it never hurts to check the basics. Is the second CD KNOWN good? Are there any deformed pins on the CD data connector (or motherboard?) Have you tried another data cable? Is the data cable orientation correct (some are not 'keyed'). Is the CD getting power? If you're absolutely sure the answers to all the above are Yes, try jumpering the CD to slave and put it on the same bus with the hard drive (which I assume is Bus 0), thus eliminating the possibility that Bus 1 is bad (you didn't say which Bus the first CD was on).
Hope this helps.

 

[Blujacket]

You're welcome, siituser, glad to assist.