UPGRADING REPAIRING PCs

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Chapter 4—SCSI and IDE Hard Drives and Optical Drives
• Check to see that you are using bus-mastering drivers on
compatible systems; install the appropriate drivers for the
motherboard’s chipset and operating system in use.
• Check to see whether you are using the CD-ROM interface
on your sound card instead of an IDE connection on the
motherboard. Move the drive connection to the IDE interface
on the motherboard and disable the sound card IDE, if
possible, to free up IRQ and I/O port address ranges.
• Open the System Properties Control Panel and select the
Performance tab to see whether the system is using MS-DOS
Compatibility mode for the CD-ROM drive. If all the IDE
drives are running in this mode, see www.microsoft.com and
query on “MS-DOS Compatibility Mode” for a troubleshooter.
If only the CD-ROM drive is in this mode, see whether you’re
using CD-ROM drivers in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.
Remove the lines containing references to the CD-ROM drivers
(don’t actually delete the lines—REM them), reboot the
system, and verify that your CD-ROM drive still works and
that it’s running in 32-bit mode. Some older drives require at
least the CONFIG.SYS driver to operate.
Trouble Using Bootable CDs
Bootable CDs are terrific vehicles for installing a standard software
image on a series of computers, or as a “bulletproof” method of
running antivirus software, but they can be tricky to use.
If you are having problems using a bootable CD, try these possible
solutions:
• Check the contents of bootable floppy disk from which you
copied the boot image during the creation of the bootable
CD. To access entire contents of a CD-R, a bootable disk must
contain CD-ROM drivers, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and CONFIG.SYS.
Test the bootable disk by starting the system with it and seeing
whether you can access the CD-ROM drive afterward.
• Use ISO 9660 format. Don’t use the Joliet format because it is
for long-filename CDs and can’t boot.
• Check your system’s BIOS for boot compliance and boot
order; CD-ROM should be listed first.
• Check the drive for boot compliance.
• SCSI CD-ROMs need a SCSI card with BIOS and bootable
capability, as well as special motherboard BIOS settings.