About halfway through installing a program from a CD the installer program stopped responding. I ended the task using the task manager, but the program installed in full. However, after this event my CD-ROM drive has become inoperable. Every time I attempt to access the drive a message appears asking ‘Please insert a disk into drive’. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drive has not fixed the problem. The computer is running Windows XP Home and the CD drive is a Benq.

Reinstalling the drive through Windows has not fixed the problem, so we should try to narrow down the fault a bit more. The simplest explanation for the problem is the cable may have fallen out of the back of the CD drive. Turn off the computer, unplug the machine from the power outlet and open the case. Make sure you ground yourself against the chassis (or better yet, use an anti-static wrist strap) and make sure the IDE cable (the flat looking cable) and power cables are firmly plugged into the drive. Reassemble the computer case, boot the computer and check whether the problem is solved. If not, we now want to narrow down the problem to either a Windows related issue, or a hardware related issue. The best way to check is by attempting to access the CD drive through DOS. Windows XP doesn’t have a neat way of creating a DOS boot disk with CD-ROM drivers, so if you can find a machine loaded with Windows 98 that will be ideal since Windows 98 boot disks have support for CD-ROM drivers. On the Windows 98 machine, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Control Panel’ and open ‘Add/Remove Programs’. Click the ‘Startup Disk’ tab and click the ‘Create Disk’ button. Once you have a boot disk created, restart the computer (with the disk in the drive) and when prompted, select to boot with CD-ROM support. Once you are at the DOS prompt, insert a CD into the CD-ROM drive and try changing to your CD-ROM drive. Be aware the drive letter assignments will be different in DOS to Windows. If you don’t know the CD-ROM drive letter, just go alphabetically from A: until you access the drive. Once you have found the drive, type ‘dir’ to list the contents of the CD. If you can view the contents, then it looks like the problem is Windows related. In this case, please contact me again for further instructions on the problem. On the other hand, if you can’t access the CD drive through DOS then it looks as if the issue is hardware related. In this situation, your best option may be to replace the drive. CD-ROM drives are very cheap, costing between $20 - $50.