CDrom data corruption

[PeterV]

All of a sudden I am getting corruption of data to and from
my two CDrom drives (one CDRW) which are master and
slave on the secondary IDE channel. Hard drives put on
there are fine. And trying them in another PC they run fine
there. Trying another CDrom results in errors again. I also
put in another system hard drive and installed WInXP afresh -
from one of the CDrom drives!! and after installation
completes I get the same corruption only on the CDroms.
So there is definitely something amiss with WinXP talking to
the drives. And how does WinXP manage to complete the
installation from the CDrom along the way!!??

I also noted that I can't install any virtual CDrom drives,
which is how I first began to note the whole problem. (I
hadn't used a CD for ages). Alcohol120% comes up saying
it can't initiate the virtual drive (which was ok before).
Unistall then re-install results in the same problem too.

The tricky part is the original WinXP has the problem, but so
does a new totally clean install of WinXP! Yet the whole
installation process, from CD, runs right through fine!

Any ideas?
Thanks.
PeterV

 

[Rich Barry]

David, putting two Drives of that type on the same channel is not a good
idea anyway. Can you split them up? Are you
using DMA or PIO mode? Did you try replacing the IDE Ribbon cable? Just
a few ideas.