No access to data on removable drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Background:
I have now seen this behaviour a few times on different systems.
Nothing connects these systems together but still this erratic behaviour is
identical.

On first few I had no time to really try and solve this problem so just
wiping C: and reinstalling did the trick. But - now I don't want to do this
anymore, I want to get a solution.

Symptoms:
All optical drives are recognized on bios and by windows correctly when no
dic is inserted. Same when USB drive or camera etc. is inserted, they are
installed and reported to be working by windows.

But - when ANY disk is inserted to optical drive, drive symbol changes from
DVD/RW/anything to just CD-ROM and it is reported as full disk with zero
bytes in.
Audio CDs can be played with Media Player.
USB ram is reported to be "non formatted" and so unusable. Same with cameras.
Installing USB printer goes just fine as long as no software is required
from CD.
Booting to safe-mode does not help, situation is just the same.

Tried methods:
Installed all chipset/device/system drivers via network. No help.
Removed drives physically. Removed drives from registry. No help.
Checked systems for viruses/trojans, no help. Some had but they were fixed.
Booting with CD works, so drive is working.
Repair installation of XP starts fine, but after first reset CD is lost again.
Only solution atm is to delete windows or format disk.

Conclusion:
Something messes up some dll or layer in XP that is actually handling
filesystem with removable drives. Drives work fine as long as they are not
tried to be accessed with XP.

Solution:
Developers can isolate files/routines that are accessed from hd after first
reboot on installation. Those files are affected ones, but they can not be
fixed with repair installation.

General:
I suspect that this problem could be fixed by simply restoring ONE file, but
restoring it with current XP tools is impossible - how to restore something
from CD when CD is not accessible?
I have personally seen this on four machines, two laptops and two desktops.
Different CPU and chipsets.
Multiple persons have reported similar problems and just formatted and
installed their system to fix this.

Now I have access to laptop that has this problem, so I can try various fixes.
 
So - nobody else has this problem?
First sign is CD/DVD drives being unusable, only audio CDs work.
 
I have the same/similar problem and have not been able to fix. I am getting a
rsm event 111 in the system event log when trying to access either CD CD/RW
or USB disk device. They show up on My Computer (0used/0free) and get error
when trying to access.

Mine will access if I reboot witht he CD or USB loaded, but as soon as I
eject or disconnect the USB device, next one is locked out.

My problem started after installing Norton Internet Security. I am runnning
XP Home SP2. Problem started back in SP1.
 

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