After I installed the service pack on a clean install of 98se every thing was doing great, audio works, online no problem, usb works everything worked. Now both my cd-rom drives (Sony drives) will now crash 90% of the time. I'm thinking drivers. Is there any thing I might be able to do. What driver could it be? I thought of reinstalling the software that came with the drives. Any help would be great!

what kind of computer are u using magnal60? specify how fast your CPU/processor, amount of RAM, and how big your hard drive is. have you tried updating the firmware/bios of your Sony CD drives? what kind of Sony CD drives are they? view these in Device Manager by opening the System control panel app and click on Device Manager tab and expand the CDROM section.

See Device Manager again to see the model number of the Sony CD drives. check with the Sony web site if they have updated firmware/bios for the cd drives.

And what exactly happens when you use the Sony CD drives after installing win98se SP? do they cause blue screen errors or do they act differently?

I installed the Win98se service pack on an old P100 mhz PC with 64 megs of RAM and it's using a Lite-On CD drive and the CD drive works properly, even with DMA setting enabled.

is your Sony CD drives connected to a SCSI card or connected to IDE cables in your computer?

Please POST your response here in this forum. Do NOT send any more "personal IMs" to me as I may discard them.

And another reason why I want you to post your responses in this forum is so that other people besides me can also help you.

try un-installing the Win98 SE service pack to see if the problem goes away. you can remove the 98se SP from Add/Remove programs, then reboot afterwards.

could it be that your Sony CD drives have dirty CD lens when trying to read a CD? test them out with different types of CDs [aka. Audio CDs, CD-Rs, CD-ROMs, and CD-RWs] buy a CD cleaner [at a computer electronic store] to clean the lens if your Sony CD drives cannot read ANY type of disc.

It could be more of a hardware problem instead of a driver problem.

I tried to uninstall the service pack windows won't let me, error message can't find inf file. I''m using ide cable.

ouch! re-install the Win98se service pack and then un-install it. for some reason, the spuninst.inf file should be stored in the \WINDOWS\INF\ folder of Win98se. is it there? Is the hard drive mentioned as drive C: in device manager and windows explorer? Before you re-install the Win98se service pack, disable any antivirus programs that are running & run Scandisk to fix all the hard drive errors.

if the spuninst.inf file is not in the 'Windows\Inf' folder then you won't be able to remove the service pack. re-installing the Win98se service pack should install the missing INF file.

i'm leaning towards more of a hardware problem than a driver problem with the sony cd drives. do the cd drives work without the 98se service pack? if they dont then it wasnt a driver problem to begin with.

As it turned out the problem I was having with the cd-rom drive was a hardware problem. I replaced the cd-rom drive with a new dvd-rom drive. It now is working great. I find it odd that the problem I was having was just after I installed the 98se 2.1a service pack. Thanks for your help erpdude8

your welcome, magnal60. guess that old cd-rom drive was worn out and could not function correctly anymore.