Benq X52 CD Rom Drive not working (by 2 users)

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You don't need a reliable system, if you had one you would have nothing to
do with your time.

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No, i don't need to.

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Because you don't have the confidence.

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There are plenty of people who think the same, i'm not one of them though
:-)

*snip*

*snip*

Sorry for delay, been away!

Basically did a format and started from scratch (again) with a downloaded
boot disk.Not quite sure why this worked because I originally installed win
98 to a new hdd using the cd drive and all was ok, but then it suddenly
disappeared like I said showing up in bios and dos boot screens but not in
windows ! Any way my motto now is "When in doubt, format c: and start
again!" works for me. : )

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No, unfortunately.
I was going to comment but decided to contact the poster directly to save
going through it again.
However the above may not be the best idea to try first in this case.
The first thing you should always check first is that the system bios can
see the drive, if not then nothing else will make it work, this can be seen
near the end of the POST (the last screen before the o/s starts to load and
can be held by hitting pause and then continued by pressing enter to allow
you time tio read it, it may also show up prior to this during Hard drive
detection depending on the bios settings.
If it does not show here then it is either knackered or disconected.
The second thing to do is to do a step by step boot to dos, by holding the
F8 key at bot to get the boot menu, check to see
if there is a cdrom driver being loaded and that two drive letters are
assigned, one to each cdrom drive.
Two things can happen here, if there is a driver and 2 letters are assigned
then it's a Windows problem and can probably be fixed by booting in safe
mode, removing any cdrom devices showing in device manager and rebooting.
The other is that no driver is loaded in dos, in which case my advice as you
posted above would apply, but first boot into safe mode and remove any
existing entries.

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From the 'missing CD ROM post further down the page;

Locutus said
after a clean install of win 98 cd drive doesn't show up in windows my
computer, explorer or device manager its there in bios and shows up during
dos start up screens, also power light is on and flashes at start up.
swapped cd drive for one I know is in working order and same thing happens.
any ideas.
thanks for any help.

Grimley said
You need to install a dos cdrom driver to allow Windows to pick it up, once
Windows finds it the dos driver is removed.

Locutus said
Well thats me lost then, not too good with dos, go on talk me through it
Pleeeeease. ; )

There was a lot of name calling, and then Grimley said this
Download and install the acdrom driver from here (it's zipped so you'll need
winzip) :
#

Locutus said
thanx for help Grim got it sorted now.

But we never knew how :>)