CD-RW drive doesn't work

[Guest]

I just installed Vista Ultimate X64 on my computer, this was a clean install
and all appeared to be working correctly. The computer has two optical drives
#1 DVD-RW and #2 CD-RW. The #1 dvd drive works fine. The Optorite CD-RW drive
is listed in the Device Manager and shows in My Computer. If I insert any
disk in the CD-RW drive it scans the disk for a few seconds and stops. You
can not get it to eject the disk or read it. I have to reboot the computer to
even get the disk ejected, sometimes when you hit restart the drive will
eject the disk before restarting. Sometime you have to do a hard reset to get
it to reboot. The CD-RW drive does work in my other system with XP X64 so the
drive does work correctly. Any idea's as to the problem?

 

[Michael Walraven]

Have you gone to the update site and checked for 'recommended' updates I
think there are several that are generally to improve the reliability
(rather than automatically updated security ones) of the system.
Before you go much further in debuging/testing I would recommend that those
upgrades also be performed.

Note: I do NOT recommend that any 'hardware' driver updates be performed. If
any are listed you would be better off going to the respective hardware
maker site and upgrading from there.

Also check your mother board/computer maker for any BIOS upgrades, Vista
sometimes needs the very latest BIOS to work correctly.

Michael
Vista Home Premium 32

 

[Guest]

I have all the updates for Vista installed critical and recommended. There
are no new hardware drivers listed for the system. There is a new BIOS
avalible but only fixes two problems:
The function "S3 resume" now works as intended.
The function "cool and quiet" now works as intended with FX60.

I don't use cool and quiet. Here are the complete spec's for my system:
Abit AT8 32X
Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Toledo
Thermaltake Toughpower 750 Watt
Corsair XMS Pro 4gig (1024 X 4) DDR 400
Two Seagate 250gig SATA2 drives in RAID-0 on SLi
Onboard Sound
Logitech Z5500 Speakers
iLo 32" HDTV for monitor
Asus EAX1900 Crossfire card 512mb
ATI X1900 XTX 512mb
A-Open DVD-RW
Optowrite CD-RW
Windows Vista Ultimate X64
Koolance EXOS2 cooling CPU and RAID-0 array

 

[Michael Walraven]

Not much left in my advice bag.
Are your DVD and CD SATA also or parallel.
I have had systems where a CD drive failed if a hard drive on same parallel
cable was active. That doesn't apply to your SATA hard drives but if the
CD/DVD are on the same cable and there is a problem with either drive
address sensing or cable/connector there might (really stretching here) be a
problem. You could try removing the DVD drive from the cable temporarily and
seeing if the CD then works (try both connectors). IF they are SATA then
obviously does not apply.


(Drives could work in XP and not in Vista as the timing of operations and
error handling may be significantly different in the respective drivers).

Michael

 

[Michael Walraven]

Additional, again only if parallel cable for the drives.

There are two types of parallel cable one has twice as many wires as the
other. The way devices are jumpered for master/slave differs depending on
which type of cable. So are the cables the same in the two machines?

And now there is not even any lint in by idea bag.

Good luck,
Michael

 

[Guest]

Both CD-RW and DVD-RW are parallel drives. Each is connected as master
devices on there seperate IDE channels. Both are using 80 pin cables, when I
checked the drive in the XP system I didn't use the same cable and I believe
it was using a 40 pin on the CD-RW drive so I will try pulling the cable out
of the XP unit and us it in the Vista unit. Also both cables put into the
Vista system are brand new, so I guess there could also be a bad cable there.
At least its worth giving it a look and try.

 

[Michael Walraven]

As a reminder, with the 80 pin cables, in general the drives should be set
to 'auto select' or some such rather than master or slave. When set that way
the selection of master/slave depends on which cable connector is used
rather than the 'jumper' settings. If it is jumpered to master and
connected to the slave connector maybe would make for confusion (I thought
it was backward compatible but there could be complications).

At least some BIOS have a selection for if the IDE channel is 40 or 80 pin
cable.

I have seen one machine that reported 'warning 40 pin cable installed,
improved operation may result if 80 pin cable used' or some such language.
But I don't remember if that came from the OS (would have been XP) or the
BIOS. (I changed out the cable with an 80 pin one).


Michael

 

[Guest]

The IDE cables I'm using in the vista system are single connector 80pin and
would be the master connection since its at the end of the cable. I used to
have a system with a Asus motherboard that gave the message you mentioned but
it was the other way around, would have better performace with 40 pin
connector and the message is a BIOS message not operating system.

Also I've never used a cable select setting, I've always set optical drives
as master or slave with no problems in 10 years of building computers.

 

[Michael Walraven]

Sure is a head-scratcher. I would be very interested in how you eventually
get it fixed.
I certainly could have gotten the 40/80 message reversed, it was a long time
ago.
Some systems I have worked on used the CS, some use master/slave. I don't
normally change whatever it is using unless have some reason to be
suspicious, never had a problem with specifying master/slave with 80 pin
cables but I wasn't sure if 'all' drives worked OK that way.

Good Luck,
Michael