i need help... i originally had windows 3.1 on my computer, then upgraded to 95, then to 98... well, after adding an extra hard drive, the computer will not boot up... it ends up in dos mode with the following: unable to detect ATAPI IDE CD-ROM drive version V1.22a ATAPI IDE CD-ROM device driver not loaded. C:\>LH C:\CPQDOS\MSCDEX.exe /D: IDECD001 device driver not found: IDECD001 no valid CDROM device drivers selected and now i am at a lost cause, and i don't know what to do... i called tech support for my computer and the tech had told me to round up a startup disk for 3.1 and re-install it or try to find the driver from that disk and then upgrade again to 95... but i don't have my reboot disk or 3.1 startup disk??? does this sound right? if anyone can help, i would greatly appreciate it! please leave me a message here, or email me at the above addy! thank you for your time!

I'm assuming that you have the correct driver for the cdrom drive. Is the new hard drive on the same cable as the cdrom drive? If so, it might be plugged wrong. One drive on a cable must be plugged as master and the other one slave.

For what ever reason you have suffered a system crash. Unplug the new hard drive and connect the Pc like it was before the new hard drive was installed. If that doesn't boot up your system Your cd rom is defected. Plug cd rom into the back of your original hard drive.Make sure the cd rom jumper setting is SLAVE. Also, If you have a windows 98 cd disk ( not UPGRADE disk) then you can formate your new hard drives and install Win 98 only. You do not have to start with win 3.1 then upgrade UNLESS you do not have a full version of win 98. Let me know if this solves your issue?

First that tech was an idiot. Ignore what he said about a win 3.1 startup disk. Your hard drives should be master and slave on the primary IDE and your cd rom should be master on your secondary. If your cd rom had been a slave on your primary IDE cable and is now a master on your secondary check your config.sys for the line that calls the cd rom drivers. Some older drivers had to have the cd rom address specified in that line. If you changed it from primary to secondary then you changed the address and the driver files would not find the cd rom. You might include a copy of your config.sys in next post. Also when you upgraded to windows, setup should have modified your autoexec.bat to call mscdex from windows\command instead of using the version in your cpqdos directory. This is not the reason your cd rom is not detected, I just find it odd. And even though win 98 didn't detect your cd rom it should have gone ahead and booted up to windows and not dropped into dos. If all this happened when you added the 2nd HD it could also be wrong jumper settings or incorrect cable connections. What kind of computer and cpu do you have?