I have a 52x Acer CD-ROM and a new Yamaha CDRW drive on the slave controller (and I'm using Win98 SE). They both worked fine until I tried to use DMA for them (in Device Manager)... Bad idea I guess. Because no CD could be read from them after that. So I disabled DMA in Device Manager and rebooted. But the CD-ROM still cannot be read! That little error pops up saying the device is not ready! DMA is now disabled but the CD-ROM and CDRW drives aren't reading anything... how can I get them back to normal?!?! I have tried removing them both in device manager and restarting, which loads them back up fine and they are recognized as D: and E: in Windows Explorer, etc., but no CDs can be read from them. Thanks in advance for your help!

First try a bootdisk with cdrom support. Can you read the cd when you use the bootdisk?

Check the settings in your CMOS to verify that all of the settings are correct. Try restoring the defaults.

No, I cannot read the contenct (dir) of the CD-ROM drive when booted from the start-up disk. I get: CDR101: Not ready reading drive E Abort, Retry, Fail?f Why can't it be read? I know the drive AND CD are good. Did I screw it up (hardware/firmware) by enabling and then disabling DMA? The second drive (F:) reads & works fine in DOS. Any ideaz?

Forgot to mention, the exact error message it gives: CDR101: Not ready reading drive E Abort, Retry, Fail?f Fail on INT 24

If it fails both from Windows and from a Dos floppy, we can be pretty sure that it's not a software problem. It might have been a coincidence that it started failing right after turning on DMA, but who know? I assume that you have removed power from the machine since it started failing.

Yes, I have removed power, even unplugged the drive for several hours. Still no go. Called Yamaha and they say it's a bad drive and even firmware updates won't help here. They sent me an RMA...