On 27 Jan 99, at 11:25, Dave Perry wrote:

> Can anyone explain to me what, technically speaking, happened here.
> I've just installed a 24x cdrom onto a computer with a 233 cyrix
> chip and 32mb of ram. The operating system is an early version of
> Win95. The system had a sound card with the old cdrom connected to
> it. I opted to replace the old sound card with the on-board sound and
> plug the ide cable from the new cdrom directly into the motherboards
> 2nd IDe channel, so I physically removed the sound card from its ISA
> slot. The motherboard had just been upgraded three months ago. I
> think it is a PC Chips model. This went fine until I booted up the
> computer and was unable to locate the cdrom in the device manager. I
> did manage to solve the problem by making install new hardware find a
> hard disk controller. Now I have my cdrom, which is great, but I'm
> not sure what happened here. Before removing the old sound card from
> the computer should I have removed it from device manager?  I didnt
> bother looking at what was installed in device manager before
> beginning the procedure. What I'm looking for here is some good
> working procedures so that my computer maintainance isn't so hit and
> miss.

  Part of Win9x's startup routine is to check which of the devices it
thinks it knows about are actually present.  So when you removed the
sound card, Windows couldn't find it -- or its CD-ROM interface.  It
probably no longer shows up in Device Manager on a normal boot -- it
may still be visible if you boot to Safe Mode, which would then let you
easily delete it.
  There are some sorts of device that Windows requires, such as a video
adapter -- if it can't find the one it knew about, it will
automatically look for some other sort.  But it doesn't need a second
IDE interface, as far as it nows, so you have to start that search
manually.


David G

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