Jerome Fine replies: I also run Windows 98 SE (Yeck!!!) on a Pentium III 750. My first reaction is that you have a bad drive. I have a number of Sony SMO S501 drives and I seem to remember that before I attempted to connect it as a SCSIn: drive under Ersatz-11, I did NOT need an ASPI driver. Also, I don't think that the drive even needs to be connected to a SCSI host adapter to be able to insert the media and have it spin up and stay spun up. On the other hand, you do mention the drive as a C501. In my experience, the S501 is actually (on the inside in addition to the power supply) a C501 that is the controller board between the host adapter and the actual drive which is the D501 - assuming that you did look inside to see the actual parts. More modern magneto optical drives have the controller imbedded into the drive so that the C501 is not present as a separate board. But having all the dip switches set at ON is correct for a SCSI ID=0. If you have the Jazz on the SCSI chain at the same time, you may have termination problems depending which device is at the end of the chain - ALSO if you use both an internal cable and the external cable at the same time. If you don't insert any media and boot Windows 98 SE, then under Windows Explorer, the drive should at least show up as "Removable Media". Then when the media goes in, if it still does not stay at spin up, it is difficult to know what the problem is. One problem might be that Windows Explorer insists that the media be correctly formatted, but that is probably shown only after successful spinup is achieved. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.