I am going completely mad trying to fix this problem !! ANY help or advice will be gladly tried and accepted !! I have a P2 450 running Win98 and various apps. I have a SCSI HP Scanjet 5P Scanner installed and a DVD drive as my D drive and a HP Series 8100 CD-ROM burner as my E drive. Last Thursday evening, I offered to scan a photo for a friend and promptly connected up my scanner to the installed SCSI card. It didn't seem to want to work and kept throwing up 'conflict' messages or 'Scanner not installed' messages. I visited the HP website and downloaded a more up to date driver file. Oh dear. After doing so, upon re-booting, my PC kept freezing with Fata Exception messages. These settled down after a few re-boots but then the PC crashed everytime I tried to open a programme via Windows Explorer. OK, I thought, I'll remove everything to do with the scanner and give up (having taken 6 hours to get this far !!). The PC re-booted as per normal on Friday evening and the D and E drives registered as Primary and Secondary slaves / masters on boot up. However, on trying to run a CD, the CD rotates but can't be seen from Win Explorer. Also, various 'other' files (CONFIG.SYS and 80% of my AUTOEXEC.BAT) have vanished. The PC IS working - I'm writing this on it now - but having gone through the 'delete them from the System Manager window', I'm fast running out of options. One other thing - in the Performance tab under system from the control panel, I have a message saying 'Drive C is using MS-DOS compatability mode file system'. Does anyone have ANY ideas please? Many thanks !!!

Ok read This

Steve Cheers for the links. Tried the first - no change. Couldn't get the Noide.Inf file to load as the CD can't be seen !! Beginning to think either something is screwed with the start-up files (AUTOEXEC and CONFIG) and I'll have to clear my data off the HDD, wipe the machine clean and re-load the OS. =( Question is - how the hell would I do this if the PC won't read the CD ?!! Aargh !!