cd/dvd drives not recognized or found

  • Thread starter Thread starter Susan
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Susan

My mom has a Dell Dimension E310 desktop computer which came with two cd/dvd
drives. When the computer boots up, there is a message that the drive1 and
drive2 are not found and to press f1 to continue, f2 to go into setup. Also
there are 2 beeps when it boots up. I noticed this about a week ago when I
installed McAfee Total Care for her and did Windows Updates but did not
pursue the issue then. I do not know if somehow I messed something up or
how long it may have been messed up.

She can insert cds into the drives and close the drives but the drives do
not show up under device manager or My Computer. I did go into the setup
and the drives were not enabled but off. I am confused because what would
change the setup? If the drives were bad or the cable loose (I tried to
google problems), wouldn't the setup still be correct with the drives
enabled? No one has opened the case and added or replaced any
hardware--these are the original drives.

Any suggestions please. My soon-to-be ninety-year-old mother misses
listening to her Paul Pott's cd.

Thanks,
Susan
 
Susan said:
My mom has a Dell Dimension E310 desktop computer which came with two cd/dvd
drives. When the computer boots up, there is a message that the drive1 and
drive2 are not found and to press f1 to continue, f2 to go into setup. Also
there are 2 beeps when it boots up. I noticed this about a week ago when I
installed McAfee Total Care for her and did Windows Updates but did not
pursue the issue then. I do not know if somehow I messed something up or
how long it may have been messed up.

She can insert cds into the drives and close the drives but the drives do
not show up under device manager or My Computer. I did go into the setup
and the drives were not enabled but off. I am confused because what would
change the setup? If the drives were bad or the cable loose (I tried to
google problems), wouldn't the setup still be correct with the drives
enabled? No one has opened the case and added or replaced any
hardware--these are the original drives.

Any suggestions please. My soon-to-be ninety-year-old mother misses
listening to her Paul Pott's cd.

Thanks,
Susan
Click to expand...

Your beep code is not listed here. They're at the bottom of the page.
The beep codes appear to be more complex than typical retail motherboards.
Your machine has diagnostic LEDs, but those help mainly if the machine
is really sick, and isn't booting up.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim3100/en/sm/adtshoot.htm#wp1130520

(From the user manual page)
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim3100/en/sm/index.htm

If I had to guess, I'd say it was related to McAfee. Is "Total Care" the
product name ? I'm having trouble finding a good web page describing it.

What happens if you attempt to boot from the CD drive ? The CD
drive has to be set up in the boot order to do that (for example,
my boot order is set floppy-CDROM-hard_drive). The boot order is
set in the BIOS setup screen.

If the CDROM comes before the hard drive in the boot order, then
inserting a bootable CD, will result in the computer booting from the CD.
If you can boot from the CD, that tells me the drive is not dead.

Then it is a matter of deciding what to boot with. I have a
collection of Linux LiveCDs, but perhaps you can think of something
that is a bit easier to prepare than one of those. The ones I've got,
are a 700MB download. If you're on dialup networking, they're not
really an option unless you buy a CD from somewhere.

If you press F2 as instructed, that will take you into the BIOS
setup screen. Computers like the Dell, will have a simplified setup
screen (at least, compared to some other machines). What you could
look for in there, is whether the interfaces to the CDs have been
disabled. The BIOS should also be doing drive detection, in which
case you may see the names of the hard drive, CD/DVD drives and so
on. There should be an Exit item, for when you're finished, and
usually this will offer options like "exit and discard changes"
or "exit and save changes". So if you take your time, you should be
able to exit the BIOS setup, without any accidents.

In this picture of a Dell screen, I notice they don't give the
proper names for the hard drive and optical drives. Maybe
entering the item, will reveal a sub-page with the details ?

http://ice.he.net/~hedden/images/Setup_menu_Dell.jpg

The example boot sequence here, has the CDROM before the hard
drive, so that an inserted CDROM will be used for booting, if
one is present during BIOS POST at powerup.

http://ice.he.net/~hedden/images/boot_seq_Dell.jpg

If I needed a small CD to boot from, I might download a
hard drive diagnostic if one is available. For example, Seagate
and Western Digital, have downloadable programs to test their
hard drive products. They may take the form of a CD image,
and boot from an included copy of FreeDOS or the like. Something
like that is a relatively small download, but still requires
that you be able to burn a CD using a second computer, in order
to have a CD to play with on the broken machine.

Paul
 
Yes, I do think it was the McAfee Total Protection (got name right now). My
mom had the McAfee and for $10 more she could renew and upgrade to the Total
Protection. So I renewed and upgraded and downloaded and intalled it.
There were questions about drives and I selected "No" answers and I think I
messed up the computer. I went to the setup screen (bios releated) and the
Drive1 and Drive2 were Off which is not how it should have been and I tried
to turn them on and save and exit, but that did not work. I am guessing
that the McAfee options I selected for setup messed up the computer. If a
cable were loose, the setup screen would still show the drives as On
wouldn't they?

My mom has the disks and when she purchased the computer years ago she paid
extra for the disks for restoring Windows, etc. They were not provided free
with the Dell purchases like they once were. She unfortunately did not know
where she placed the computer documentation. I hope to go over and find it
and and look at the disks.
 
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