Casey,

My first thought here would be the CD Rom drive.    I would open the
case and remove the IDE ribbon cable.  Then try booting to a floppy.

If it will boot, then your problem is on the IDE end.

So, to follow my first thought:   I would then hook up the hard drive
and see if it will boot from the hard drive.  Then try booting from
the floppy.    If these are fine... ( they should be based on your original
problem), then try connecting the CD Rom drive again.   If you problem
surfaces...  you have your culprit.    A 24x CD Rom drive can be purchased
for about $40 today.  That is a cheap repair.

If it turns out it is not the CD drive...   then try removing everything from
the motherboard except your video card and floppy drive.   The first
step to building a computer is to have the motherboard, ram, CPU, video card
and floppy drive connected...    and the system to boot from a floppy drive.

After this you can start a trial and error approach to diagnostics...   it could
be the motherboard and the IDE controller is failing...    this is hard to
diagnois.   You can try using a known good components on the controller
and if the problem arises again...   then you have narrowed it to the IDE
controller.

     Bob Wright        [log in to unmask]
The NOSPIN Group  http://nospin.com


At 08:38 AM 8/27/98 , you wrote:
>Hi all, I was recently called to a friend's house to help them with a
>problem they were having.  Their computer, P-100 on a VX AOpen board,
>kept getting "Illegal Operation" codes followed by a really buggy
>system.  Explorer.exe would not work, IE3 would not work, and the CD-ROM
>would not access.
>I opened the case and checked all the cables. CD-ROM on Sec., IDE, so I
>slaved it to the Prim., IDE on the HDD.CD worked! But, then the A-drive
>quit working??
>Nothing I've tried would get the a-drive to work.  I tried three
>different cable, and another "working" a-drive.  Rebooted, and the CD
>isn't recognized by WIN95 (b) anymore!
>Checked system device mgr., and the secondary IDE shows a conflict.
>Removed and re-installed IDE HDD controllers.
>And, still, no luck.  CD not recognized on sec., IDE/ A: will not read,
>locks if try to access/ machine won't boot if CD slaved to Primary IDE
>on HDD cable.
>Afraid to reformat because I have no floppy access andno CD-ROM access.
>Thoughts? it's a fairly new mobo [1 yr., old] and shouldn't be going
>bad, but my next move might be a new mobo for them . . .
>This problem originally started out as software related