REALLY could use some help on this one PLEASE!

Working on an aging Gateway Celeron. It sometimes will show the CD Contents or do an AutoRun from the CD drive. But more often than not, it just spins the CD up then slows it down again, never displaying the CD contents in the Windows Explorer and not doing an AutoRun.

I first logically thought it had a bad drive. I replaced the drive and got the EXACT same results: It would read a CD at times and work fine, but then the next time you try the drive it acts like there's no disk inside (but you can hear it spin up when you insert a CD)

So then I replaced the cable with the one in the Sony CD box. Same results. Next I tried putting the CD on the Hard Drive's IDE cable, as a slave. Same results. In all three cases, Windows XP reported the drive as having no problems.

So I've spent an hour on it, and it's doing the exact same thing it did for the client with the original CD drive. SUGGESTIONS GREATLY APPRECIATED!

-PAUL IN SAN DIEGO

Oh yea but then you run into having to sell data backup and windows installation, et all. And ya still wouldn't even know until done if the prob went away or not. If it's a controller chip on the board I'd be fried.

Anyone know is it the same controller for both IDE channels? Doesn't matter which IDE channel I use, the results are the same ...