CD and DVD Drives quit working simultaneously - helphelpehelp...

[Guest]

Installed CD nd DVD drives have been working flawlessly for a year or so.
All of a sudden, we have the following symptoms:

1. Autorun appears to have quit working
2. In Explorer, the names of the D: and E: drive are now "CD-ROM" insted of
the old ones (Which I forget, but I know one was "DVD - something")
3. Any attempt to see files on an inserted CD results in Explorer not
seeing anything
4. If I attempt to copy files to a blank CD-R using SONIC Record Now Plus
7.x, I get a message saying to insert a writeable CD, but it never recognizes
that I've inserted the CD
5. Sometimes the drive will spoolup for a long time before ejecting a new CD
6. I am able to rightclick the drive in Explorer and get it to eject, so I
know electrons are flowing to the drive
7. I have done system restore to checkpoints taken back a month or so
(before this problem starting happening) and it did not help.
8. The Driver Wizard says it can't find a more recent driver than I am using
(cdrom.sys, I think).
9. Device manager has the proper names for the two drives
10. When I insert a fresh CD in the drive, the LED flashes for 5 or 10
seconds, and then stops.
11. It seems (but I can't prove this) that it's getting progressively
worse. On Saturday, my granddaughter's reading software was reading a CD
(Autorun was not working, though), and today the system won't read that CD at
all.

My personal feeling is that it's not hardware, since both drives crapped out
at the same time - but what the heck do I know?

I need help doing whatever diagnostics might help figure out the cause of
this. I will be clling Dell in the AM, but I don't expect much help there -
I expect them to point the finger at XP Pro and then go wash their hands. I
do have onsite support, so I may try to hold their feet to the fire and get
someone to come out, but I'd have to watch like a hawk to make sure he/she
didn't relly screw things up by thrashing around.

This seems to be a pervasive problem - I've read many posts describing
symptoms quite similar to mine. Doesn't it seem reasonable that there's a
common failure point someplace that's the root of all these problems?

With this many people all eperiencing the same problems, shouldn't this be
high priority XP problem?

Where do I sign up to be "highly distressed"?

 

[Guest]

Further info that may be pertinent:

1. Both drives show in My Computer
2. AFAIK, there have been no installs/uninstalls of cd burning software
3. I think my wife may have installed Kodak EasyShare software, and I saw a
reference to that someplace - is there a common connection between that s/w
and CD access problems?
4. We have SONIC Record Now Plus installed
5. The Upper Limits registry entry has but one value: ASAPI. I notice
that on another PC we've got, there are quite a few other values shown in
Upper Limits. Do you think that disparity is significant?

Hope this additinal info will help someone guide us to a solution - thanks!

 

[Guest]

--
Dave Jenkins
K5KX

Installed CD nd DVD drives have been working flawlessly for a year or so.
All of a sudden, we have the following symptoms:

1. Autorun appears to have quit working
2. In Explorer, the names of the D: and E: drive are now "CD-ROM" insted of
the old ones (Which I forget, but I know one was "DVD - something")
3. Any attempt to see files on an inserted CD results in Explorer not
seeing anything
4. If I attempt to copy files to a blank CD-R using SONIC Record Now Plus
7.x, I get a message saying to insert a writeable CD, but it never recognizes
that I've inserted the CD
5. Sometimes the drive will spoolup for a long time before ejecting a new CD
6. I am able to rightclick the drive in Explorer and get it to eject, so I
know electrons are flowing to the drive
7. I have done system restore to checkpoints taken back a month or so
(before this problem starting happening) and it did not help.
8. The Driver Wizard says it can't find a more recent driver than I am using
(cdrom.sys, I think).
9. Device manager has the proper names for the two drives
10. When I insert a fresh CD in the drive, the LED flashes for 5 or 10
seconds, and then stops.
11. It seems (but I can't prove this) that it's getting progressively
worse. On Saturday, my granddaughter's reading software was reading a CD
(Autorun was not working, though), and today the system won't read that CD at
all.

My personal feeling is that it's not hardware, since both drives crapped out
at the same time - but what the heck do I know?

I need help doing whatever diagnostics might help figure out the cause of
this. I will be clling Dell in the AM, but I don't expect much help there -
I expect them to point the finger at XP Pro and then go wash their hands. I
do have onsite support, so I may try to hold their feet to the fire and get
someone to come out, but I'd have to watch like a hawk to make sure he/she
didn't relly screw things up by thrashing around.

This seems to be a pervasive problem - I've read many posts describing
symptoms quite similar to mine. Doesn't it seem reasonable that there's a
common failure point someplace that's the root of all these problems?

With this many people all eperiencing the same problems, shouldn't this be
high priority XP problem?

Where do I sign up to be "highly distressed"?

I resolved the problem today, and thought the highlights of the experience
might prove helpful to others.

I spent many hours (4 or so) on the phone with Dell support, trying all the
standard things. I uninstalled/reinstalled the drives, and the adapter. I
uninstalled all CD burining software I had installed (Feurio and SONIC Record
Now Plus 7.3). I removed the LowerFilters and UpperFilters entries from the
registry, as has been recommended in many places in these fora and elsewhere.
All to no avail.

The next-to-last recommendation from Dell was to reformat my hard drive and
reinstall Windows (and, of course, all my other stuff). I balked at this,
and the support guy said he'd check with his Tehnical Supervisor to see if
there was a way that could be avoided.

Wen he came back, we tried a few other things (can't remember now what they
were, but they didn't work.) At one point, we tried booting from the the XP
installation CD (which didn't work). During that exercise, I noticed that
the names of the drives that BIOS reported were not the same names that I had
previously seen. As a matter of fact, they were just slightly garbled:
SAMSUNG was QANSUNQ, etc.

Whether it was just a stroke of insight on the part of the support guy, or
whether his supervisor had suggested it, I'll never know. But at that point,
he began thinking that the problem had a hardware component, instead of being
solely a software problem. He suggested reseating the drive ribbon cable at
the drives and at the motherboard, which I did. Voila! When I rebooted, the
drives were found as new hardware, their names were correct, and I could read
from them! Furthermore, after reading the CD-RW, the LowerFilters entry in
the registry had been populated. (I'm assuming the UpperFilters entry will
get populated when I read rom the other drive - is that how it works?)

In summary, I don't know if was the cable reseat alone, or the reseat in
conjunctionn with the registry changes, or registry changes AND cable reseat
AND software uninstall. But now it works.

Hope his helps someone else with similar problem...