What OS are you running?  Where did you see this message?  Does the drive not show up in My Computer?

When you swapped CD drives did you make sure that the ribbon was connected the right way around, ie the red wire nearest the power plug?

Did you check to see that the jumpers were correctly set?  Most new CD drives are default-jumpered as Master, while your previous drive may have been slaved to the hard drive and jumpered as a Slave.  If you simply switched drives, and the CD is slaved to the HDD, you'll need to change the jumpers.

Or, if the second IDE socket on the motherboard is empty, connect the ribbon there and run it as Master.

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
[log in to unmask]

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Colin Martin-Howes 
  Subject: [PCBUILD]


  Dear All,

  Please can someone help?

  We need to format our C Drive as it has become unstable.  We have downloaded
  the boot disc from the web site but our problem is this.  We installed a
  CDRW many months ago now and when we tried to start the format we came up
  with an error message telling us that the system could not find the CD
  drive.  We don't want to try and format now incase we will not be able to
  reinstall windows.

  We have formatted the computer before and had no problems but this was
  before we changed the CD ROM drive for the CDRW drive.



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