DVD, CD and floppy Drive Problems

[Neil from Sask]

Suddenly, my Windows Explorer and the 'Start -> Run'
command are having difficulty recognizing disks in my DVD,
CD and floppy drives. The message for the CD drive is that
the disk is either unformatted or corrupt. For a disk in
the DVD drive, nothing happens when clicking on the drive
in Windows Explorer. For the floppy drive, the message is
always "disk needs formatting". Yet when I access the
disks using an installed application like Windows Media
Player or RecordNow, I can read the disks fine. The device
manager says all drives are working properly. I've
installed nothing recently and have made no changes other
than performing a Windows Update on Feb 20th, which
included running the Malicious Code removal tool. I wonder
if that has something to do with my problem. In the
meantime, I cannot use my disk drives to install anything.
Appreciate any suggestions.
Regards.

 

[Guest]

From reading various newsgroups around the Micrsoft forums, I was able to
resolve my problem. After rebooting with my disk inside my DVD-ROM drive, I
noticed that the functionality of reading the disk with Windows Explorer had
returned, only to disappear again once I removed the disk and re-inserted it.
Thus, a software product that was loading at the later stages of my startup
was obviously causing my grief. It turned out to be an old version of Ahead
InCd (apparently a Flash ROM category of drive) that was fouling my system.
Once I uninstalled InCd, using my Add/Remove programs from the Control Panel,
my drives all began to work normally again. I'm not sure what triggered the
problem, as it happened quite suddenly this weekend, after years of
stability. A number of posts had indicated that "Flash ROM drives" were the
culprit. I wasn't too sure what that meant, but finally put the pieces
together.

Hope this helps anyone else who is having similar problems.