When I got this computer it had a Western Digital 8 gig drive. I think the guy who put it together did not set up the drive in BIOS properly because every time I accessed the CD drive there would be this quite loud humming noise. I tried to resolve the issue but the drive crashed hard and I was unable to get anything to work around it, like Scandisk. I replaced it with another drive. I still have it and wonder if there is any way to revive it? Otherwise it will go to the landfill.

loud humming sounds more like an mechanical problem with the hard drive. if you don't need any of the data, just chunk it.

I suggest trying a full format, FDISK and FDISK /MBR then Re-install windows to see the effects of a "fresh install" of Windows. Was there a disk in the cd-rom when you accessed it? if so the humming noise is probably and most likely the cd spinning up (Especially in 40X cd-rom drives and faster) Hope this helps :-)

No, since both the hard drive and CD drive are IDE, they were conflicting. After I installed a new drive, I tried to save this old one, but it will not allow scandisk to finish. It was probably such a hard crash that the usual means of repair won't work.