Hi. I have a Hewlett Packard CD-Writer Plus that used to load in my Win 98 "My Computer" and no longer does. This happened a while ago and I'm confused to what caused it. I looked for a driver but none exists anywhere on the internet, so I emailed the company and they said it should run fine without one or with a windows generic driver. (but I'm not sure which of the 2 they said) I checked the wiring in my computer and everything looks fine, so then I moved the slave/master setting switch to different positions and rebooting only to find no position worked, so I have set it back to the original position. If anyone thinks they know even just a little bit about what is happening here, please respond soon. Thanks!

The first thing to do is to determine if this is a software or hardware related problem. Most new computers will show on the screen if the CD-rom is detected on boot-up. Does it show it being detected on boot-up? Also you could get a bootdisk with cdrom support at www.bootdisk.com to see if it can find it. Do you have more than one cdrom in your system? I have a HP CD-Writer Plus 9100 and it is detected fine by windows.

Actually, yes, it shows up at bootup as Primary Slave, and I have a Primary Master that's a hard drive, and a Secondary Master that's another hard drive. I don't have another CD-rom though, and it doesn't show in windows. Another problem is when I push DEL at startup to go to the BIOS settings screen, it won't detect my CD-rom, but will detect my hard drives. I might try the www.bootdisk.com thing, but I don't think it will help.

Yes give the bootdisk.com a try. The BIOS detection may refer to just hard drives. This may be a windows problem

I'll give it a shot, hold on for about 10 minutes and if I still have problems, I should have posted a message by then, otherwise, I'll probably have got it working. Either way, thanks for the help.

When did you install the second hard drive? Did the cd rom drive disappear after installing the second drive? I have my fastest hard drive set up as the primary master, and the second harddrive set up as the primary slave, a dvd drive as the secondary master and cd r/w drive set up as the secondary slave.