CD-ROM does not appear on boot
I work as a computer tech in one of the buildings at my university, and we're having a rather strange problem with some IBM 6862-U7U desktop systems.
We put together a Windows XP image for those systems, and are having a very strange problem with the CD-ROM drive. For most systems (but not all), the CD-ROM drive does not appear in My Computer (or the device manager, for that matter) when the system starts up. Here are a couple of the ways that we were able to get the CD-ROM drive to appear:
1) Scan for new hardware in the device manager.
2) Boot the system with a CD in the drive (strange but true).
Since the average user of these systems isn't going to be a computer wiz, that is unacceptable.
The CD-ROM drive in question is an LG CD-ROM CRD-8400B, and the problem affects nine out of ten systems that we put out.
Thanks in advance for any help.
We put together a Windows XP image for those systems, and are having a very strange problem with the CD-ROM drive. For most systems (but not all), the CD-ROM drive does not appear in My Computer (or the device manager, for that matter) when the system starts up. Here are a couple of the ways that we were able to get the CD-ROM drive to appear:
1) Scan for new hardware in the device manager.
2) Boot the system with a CD in the drive (strange but true).
Since the average user of these systems isn't going to be a computer wiz, that is unacceptable.
The CD-ROM drive in question is an LG CD-ROM CRD-8400B, and the problem affects nine out of ten systems that we put out.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Callandor
When you made the image, did you use the same CDROM drive as is on the other machines? Are the drives detected properly in the BIOS of the machines, both before and after installing the image?
ASKER
Yes, all of the CD-ROM drives are the same, and they are detected by the BIOS.
I should have probably been more specific in my first post -- this problem even occurs before we image the system. The only reason I know that it works on some and not others is because we loaded the image to about twenty of the systems before we realized that there was a problem.
I should have probably been more specific in my first post -- this problem even occurs before we image the system. The only reason I know that it works on some and not others is because we loaded the image to about twenty of the systems before we realized that there was a problem.
Do all of the computers have the same number/type of drives (floppy/zip/hard).
Maybe the bios is allocating differing IRQ/DMA on the different machines, but the xp image is set to the ones used on the machine when creating the image.
Perhaps you could create a script file to automatically run the "scan for new hardware" once when the system is logged into for the first time.
Maybe the bios is allocating differing IRQ/DMA on the different machines, but the xp image is set to the ones used on the machine when creating the image.
Perhaps you could create a script file to automatically run the "scan for new hardware" once when the system is logged into for the first time.
<<I should have probably been more specific in my first post -- this problem even occurs before we image the system. The only reason I know that it works on some and not others is because we loaded the image to about twenty of the systems before we realized that there was a problem.>>
the problem occurs before you image the system? being the system you create the image from has this issue? if so why not recreate the image from 1 that works flawless?
the problem occurs before you image the system? being the system you create the image from has this issue? if so why not recreate the image from 1 that works flawless?
ASKER
We tried recreating the image from a working system but that didn't work; after we pushed the image back down it did the same thing again.
gor: I was actually thinking of writing something to scan every time (the drive disappears every time the system boots, not just the first time), but I don't know how I would go about doing that.
Also, I raised the point value to 500...this problem seems to be more obscure than I thought it was.
gor: I was actually thinking of writing something to scan every time (the drive disappears every time the system boots, not just the first time), but I don't know how I would go about doing that.
Also, I raised the point value to 500...this problem seems to be more obscure than I thought it was.
When the systems don't load the cdrom are they noted in the BIOS? also have you tried a test run on any of the pc's that have the problem and installed a fresh copy instead of an image to see if the problem exists?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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Are you saying that all the machines detected the drives properly before the imaging and after, but still had this problem in some?
ASKER
I'm not really sure, all I know is that the CD-ROM does not initially get detected unless the BIOS gets updated. After we went around to all of the computers we've done (even the ones that we imaged before we discovered the problem) the success rate was 100%. The only reason it worked on a couple of them before we found out the solution is that the BIOS on those had already been flashed at some point in time.
A very strange problem, indeed. I'm just glad it's fixed.
A very strange problem, indeed. I'm just glad it's fixed.