Hi, I have a Dell Inspiron 5000e laptop (almost 4 years old i think) with PIII proccessor. I had some virus related problems, so i formatted the hard drive and am now trying to reinstall windows me. I get to the Windows Setup menu, and just as its about to start and it apptempts to acess setup.exe from the disc, i get the message CDR101, D drive not ready. Or if i try from the command prompt, CDR101, E drive not ready. But the cd is in there and I havent had serious problems with the cdrom drive before. I'm using the same windows me disc that came with the system that i've used before in this same process. Is my cdrom drive just too damaged or something? I would hate to spend that much money getting a new cdrom drive for such an old comp, but i cant afford a new one at the moment either. Any suggestions? Thanks, Aaron

For the price of a good meal and the two bottles of Maalox that you are going to need to quite down that ulcer you are giving yourself over it, you could buy a decent CD-Rom drive. They are not very expensive at all if you look around. CD-Rom drives go bad with use because finger prints and scratches on CD require it to use higher power for the laser, which burns it out or weakens it. Most only last a few years, good ones like Compaq uses last longer, but they all overheat and start to fail at some point. Live with it. First, make sure the bottom of the CD is clean. No finger prints. Check the CD-Rom drive cable and make sure it is not loose, damage or to near the power supply. Four/five year old Compaq system boards also develop leaks in some of the capacitors that cause the IDE channels to develop read problems. Look for signs of "damage" near the IDE cable connectors. In addition, the error recovery of the Windows Setup program is, well "really bad". It can not handle CD-Rom or CD errors very well. With this type of problem you have to boot with a startup diskette and see if you can read most of the disk drive. Then create a work folder on the disk drive and copy the contents of the Win98 folder to the temp folder on the disk drive. Then run the Setup from the disk drive. In some cases like this, you have pull out the CD-Rom drive and if it is on its own IDE cable, change Compaq's default jumper setting from CS (Cable Select) to MS (Master). Usually works a lot better. The reason you have not had "any trouble" with the drive (that you know about) is that Windows has very good error recover, it just keeps trying, and does not tell you about problems unless there is nothing it can do to get around the problem.

JackG, the person has a laptop so can't do a # of things you suggested like checking the caps & cables. Aaron, get a cd/dvd disk cleaner to clean the laser lens or use isopropyl alcohol & a q-tip to clean the lens. as you do get to a certain point installing windows see if can borrow a copy to see if problem still exists or that you can load windows david