Disappearing CD drives

[lewisp]

Crossposted to Windows 95/98 forum

Over the past couple of months, most times that I've switched on my PC one of the two CD drives has been missing from Windows explorer. The first drive is a DVD/CD as the master drive (D on the secondary IDE. The other is a CD/RW on the slave side (E of the secondary IDE. The drive that goes missing is the DVD. A reboot sorts it out.

For the first time today I switch my PC on and there are <i>no</i> CD drives to be found. Reboot #1 and the first drive appears. Reboot #2 and drive #2 appears.

What is going on? Is this a progressive error?

System is a Pentuim III 800 running Windoze 98 SE, 258MB RAM.

 

[Mulga]

CD/RWs generally like to be set as Master devices, as a first step I would try switching the two around. However if this problem is something that just appeared and is gradually getting worse I would suspect a hardware problem, either the controller, cable or one of the drives may be on the way out. All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.