After moving my mothers computer from one room to another, hooking it up I've had a problem with the rom drive. It shows activity on boot up but when I went to put the cd in to install the server it gave me the 'drive not ready, not accessible' message. It showed initial activity upon putting the cd in but that's all it did. I have very limited computer knowledge which I freely admit but I did check the device manager and it showed no problems with the drive although it does have a ?? for some USB device. We were networked by a gateway before and all the server stuff was on my computer but without the rom drive I can't install it on hers.  I can't give you her comp specs other than she's running Win98SE and has 256 ram. I 'think' she is using the AMD 500 but until I go back over there and check that's the best I can tell you. I did check the connections inside her tower since the one side refuses to stay on and everything is connected fine. I would appreciate any input/info on this and since I've just moved and am even more braindead than normal please use easy to understand terms for the thinking impaired one here LOL

Thanks in advance!!

If you're brave enough you might want to open the case and try pushing in the cables for the cd-rom firmly both on the back of the cdrom drive and on the motherboard. Be careful to touch something metal (besides the computer) before opening it up to discharge any static you have on you.

Thanks but that was one of the first things I did after checking the device manager. Will keep trying

I'm not quite sure by reading your first post - since it has been working has the setup in terms of where the CDRom was plugged in been changed at all, or has everything physically stayed the same?  If it's the same, then either the drive bus has a dodgy connection (in which case it needs replacing) or there's a software problem at hand.

There are various other things if there has been any change in hardware that could be the problem.