I have an older computer running Win ME that I wanted to replace the old CD player with a Liteon DVD player. Life went well, the swapout was successful and I could use it to install software.

However, I was unable to get it to play DVDs so I tried several freeware and GNU DVD players. One of them flashed a brief message that I believe asked if I wanted to use DMA (Not sure, I had an eight year old climbing up in my lap, I just clicked "Ok"). I was then prompted to reboot the system.

The system displays the ME splash screen but then hangs after the slash screen goes back to the BIOS text display.

Booting in Safe mode worked and showed the drive existed. I used the hardware manager to remove the drive and rebooted. In safe mode, it had found the drive again. I replaced the DVD with the original CD player. It still hung up on a normal boot but the original drive showed up correctly in safe mode.

This went on with several drives that I had laying around. I finally gave up and deleted all of the drives using device manager and put the original CD player back in. Now the system still hangs during normal boots, boots into safe mode okay but doesn't detect or show the drive in safe mode.

Removing the CD player allows the machine to boot normally. Booting the machine from drive 'a:' with a boot disk with CD support allows access to the CD player with no problems.

Anyone have any suggestions? The eight year old is not really happy with her dad for killing her computer...

In Safe Mode if necessary, run REGEDIT and do a search for NOIDE key. If found delete the entry and reboot.

Use ADD/Remove programs first to delete any/all DVD player software that might still be installed. One of them may still have a driver set to use DMA and your system/drive is not supporting it. Then search through your Start Menu for these programs and check for any uninstall options.

If that fails, boot to the Start Menu and select the BOOTLOG mode, and let it boot. After it hangs, let it set a few minutes to make sure it does not continue on. The reboot the system into Safe Mode and look at the Hidden BOOTLOG.TXT file generated. Look at the last few lines and see if it gives you a clue as to what is hanging the system. ODD are that it is loading a VXD driver for one of the DVD player packages you tried to install and there is either a conflict between the different drivers or a conflict with the hardware you have.