hey everyone, i'm at a friends house and i need help with a computer prob. it all started when i was trying to install windows 98 on this machine. it's an old packard bell.. 100 MHz, 16 megs of ram.. 4x cd-rom drive i believe.. pretty slow basically. this is gonna be used for a small server computer on the house system. anyways while installing windows 98 (from cd) it stopped on 69% and said there was a corrupt cab file.. so i thought i should restart the computer and try to reinstall.. well i restarted.. used a win98 boot disk (it would still boot into DOS), started with cd-rom capabilities.. then my problem starts here. it won't recognize the cd drive. i tried looking in the CMOS setup (old phoenix bios if that helps any) and looking for probs there and there wasn't anything.. i knew this wouldn't help any but i opened the case and checked jumper settings and checked if the IDE cable was intact and checked the power cord. (with multimeter) but i knew that worked already since i tried the eject button... any ideas anyone? this one is mind boggling.

May be your 98 Disk is bad, try to reformat the hard drive with the 98 startup disk and start over with a good 98 disk.

HwInfo (Hardware History Diagnostic Tool). HWINFO.exe resides in your Windows folder. But normally (run by itself), HwInfo does NOT display anything, only performs a full system checkup, and stores the system information in the HWINFO.DAT binary file, also found in C:\Windows. To force its User Interface (UI) to become "visible", you need to run it with this command line parameter: HWINFO /UI Just like HwDiag, HwInfo displays loads of hardware related information about your computer, by reading the Registry. The list is actually huge, but VERY useful in tracking potential system errors, lockups, incompatibilities etc. HwInfo's color coded entries have not changed. Here they are: GREEN = Registry entries. BROWN = Configuration Manager. MAGENTA = File attributes. BLUE = Warning messages. RED = Error messages. BTW: HwInfo "clutters" your hard disk with these 3 files: HWINFO.DAT: (you need to "strip" it of its Hidden and Read-only attributes FIRST to allow for deletion) = in C:\Windows, HWINFOD.VXD + MSISYS.VXD: (Archive attribute) = in C:\Windows\System, and they are NOT needed after you're done using it, and you can safely delete them, they will be recreated to contain your up to date system specs whenever you run HwInfo anyway. :)