Windows will not Assign a Drive Letter to my CD-Rom

[himini]

OK I think this is a tough one. I'm working on a customer's Win98SE computer that had lots of malware which has now all been removed successfully. I noticed his CD-rom drives didn't show up in "My Computer" so I went through some standard troubleshooting steps. Drives are recognized in Bios AND in device manager. I've swapped out with other drives same problem. I've changed his IDE controller settings to "Both IDE channels enabled." I've tried uninstalling the drives to let Windows re-install on reboot. No change. Yet I booted up his computer with a BartPE disc no problem. So I don't think it could be a hardware problem.

I've also tried changing the "reserved drive letters" for the cd-roms (in device manager) but still no change. When I reboot Windows will still not assign a drive letter even though the drives are recognized and working properly. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Hello, and welcome to the Windows Forum.

What I would do at this stage is a repair install of Win 98. This was a fairly easy thing to do with Win 9x.

Run Batch98 to save all system info onto a msbatch.inf file, then perform the repair install with the msbatch.inf file as input parameter to the setup command.

Repair install will just install missing or corrupted files over the existing Windows installation wihtout losing any installed files, components, or applications. This will most likely fix the missing drive letter.