HP Pavilion 3100 weird CD-Rom issues (in windows 95 only)

[brad162]

Ok, so i have this system that's set up on my desk and all it's used for is generally internet radio through Windows Media Player 6.1 and making floppies for my old systems, but has developed an really odd issue.

When i am using Windows 95 (i have re-installed using my OSR 2 disc and also Win95A disc), the CD-Rom acts totally funny. I have used two drives (the original HP drive and a Sony 52x CD-RW Drive i just pulled from my Dell Dimension 9100 in full working order), but when i go to read a file over 2MB it stalls, and when i go to play an audio CD it randomly just changes tracks without me telling the CD Player app to do it.

When i boot into DOS with a floppy, or even when i installed Windows 3.1 on an extra hard drive had, the CD-Rom drive works just fine (both the stock and the CD-RW drive)

I have re-installed Windows 95 three times, and am out of ideas with this.

Here are the system specs (and why i dont put 98 or 2000 on it hah)

P1 - 166MHz MMX
16MB Ram (need to break down and upgrade it to it's max 64MB
2GB original hard drive (more than enough space for what i use it for)
16x CD-ROM (stock) or 52x CD-RW (want to go back to stock since it matches the case)
Crystal Audio built in (sucks, but only two expansion slots)
S3 Trio64V+ (1MB Memory)
USB 1.0 (works with practically nothing, it's so finacy(sp) but im guessing Win95 USB support doesnt help either)

So any ideas why Windows 95 would be causing this issue? all i have installed is IE 5.5, WinImage, WinZip, Windows Media Player, and WinAmp.

 

[Tetrium]

I'm not too savvy about this but could it be your cdrom driver? Have you tried swapping IDE cables?

 

[brad162]

I'm not too savvy about this but could it be your cdrom driver? Have you tried swapping IDE cables?

well the issue is that windows uses it's own cd-rom driver, and there's no way to change it, i havent tried swapping the cable, and for some reason didnt think of that, so i'll give that a shot and see where i get!

 

[vwestlife]

Try using the DOS drivers for the CD-ROM drive (the .SYS driver in CONFIG.SYS and MSCDEX in AUTOEXEC.BAT) with Windows 95. That should cause Windows 95 to recognize that you already have the DOS CD-ROM driver in place, and not load its own CD-ROM driver on top of it. This will take up more memory, but stands a good chance of solving your drive's erratic behavior in Windows.

 

[brad162]

Well i just ended up dumping Win95 and putting NT 4.0 Workstation (at least it can get ie 6 and newer versions of Firefox) and the CD drive issue has vanished.

The only issue i have is NT 4.0 is awful with 16MB Ram, so im going to have to give in and buy memory, but i did find the 32MB sticks for 4.99 with free shipping, so im just going to max it out at 64mb and it should be good.

 

[brad162]

just an update, the issue came back in NT, so i decided to try a PCI IDE controller (there goes the better video card), and that fixed it, it seems to be an issue with the internal IDE Bus. Who knows, it is an HP