Weird CD reading problem

[Devang Devani]

I'm trying to revive an old Pentium system running win95 as a computer used
strictly for word processing and nothing else. I have a copy of Office 97
Pro on CD but am having a problem installing it.

When I put the CD into the drive, the drive cannot recognise the CD. It
just gives me an error stating "Drive failed. Abort, Retry, Cancel?". I
have swapped the drive for another that I had on another win98 machine and
still the same problem. Then I checked the CD on a winXP system and it read
perfectly fine. I formatted the harddrive and started over with the updated
drivers for both cd-roms, same problem. So the logical conclusion is that
both drives that I tried it on are defective right? Wrong, I tried other
Cd's ... music, data, games and they all read and executed perfectly.

Does anyone have any ideas on why it wont let me read this one CD that I
need. It's kinda ironic how the life of the machine depends on this one CD
to work but it wont

 

[Ralph Mowery]

I'm trying to revive an old Pentium system running win95 as a computer
used

strictly for word processing and nothing else. I have a copy of Office 97
Pro on CD but am having a problem installing it.

When I put the CD into the drive, the drive cannot recognise the CD. It
just gives me an error stating "Drive failed. Abort, Retry, Cancel?". I
have swapped the drive for another that I had on another win98 machine and
still the same problem. Then I checked the CD on a winXP system and it read
perfectly fine. I formatted the harddrive and started over with the updated
drivers for both cd-roms, same problem. So the logical conclusion is that
both drives that I tried it on are defective right? Wrong, I tried other
Cd's ... music, data, games and they all read and executed perfectly.

Does anyone have any ideas on why it wont let me read this one CD that I
need. It's kinda ironic how the life of the machine depends on this one CD
to work but it wont

Some drives (especially the older 8x or older) drives will not read some
cd's that have been copied. Has to do with the color of the disc and the
laser from what I have been told.

 

[John]

Some drives (especially the older 8x or older) drives will not read some
cd's that have been copied. Has to do with the color of the disc and the
laser from what I have been told.

Yeah that used to be a lot more common with older drives. I used to
see explanations on a fair amount of commercial software - like some
games that couldnt even be read on some drives. I bought two drives -
one I got for a persons PC couldnt read Myst at all. Another was
horrible . it would disappear constantly and not read disks it seemed
randomly working and not working. I thought it was the PC until I saw
the exact same drive in another PC having the same problems.