Strange Problem, few details

  • Thread starter Thread starter DavidJ726
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DavidJ726

I'm headed over to a friends house in about an hour to see if I can't help
him with the following CD burning related problem, I know it's not a lot to
go on, but any additional idea's would help.

When using Windows Media 10.x to rip a cd, the computer freezes.
When using Nero 7.x to copy a CD, the computer reboots.
No BSOD in either case.
Other than that the PC works fine.

What I walked him through last night:
Checked the device manager to make sure there were no conflicts or problems.
Ran Nero's tool kit on the CD & DVD drives to make sure they were recognized
and operational. They were
Went to MS website to verify XP is current. It is.
Had him try different source & target cd's.

What I plan on doing this morning:

1.) Check the device manager to make sure the devices are "working"
2.) Check system resources, see what is being loaded at startup.
3.) Open the case and make sure all cables are firmly attached, that memory
is securly seated, and that the powersupply is sufficient.
4.) Determine the make of the optical drives and check their websites for
help.
5.) Clean the lens of the optical drives.

Any other troubleshooting tips?

Thanks,
David
 
Make sure you have the latest device driver for the drive. Check the
manufacturer's site - not Microsoft. Also, make sure that the write speeds
sync properly - don't want a write speed faster than the drive can handle.
This could happen if the driver is outdated and can't correctly sense the
max speed of the drive. Make sure that all the updates from MS are loaded.
Run a Custom update rather than an Express. This might catch updates that
affect drive compatibility. Good luck.
 
DavidJ726 said:
I'm headed over to a friends house in about an hour to see if I can't help
him with the following CD burning related problem, I know it's not a lot
to go on, but any additional idea's would help.

When using Windows Media 10.x to rip a cd, the computer freezes.
When using Nero 7.x to copy a CD, the computer reboots.
No BSOD in either case.
Other than that the PC works fine.

What I walked him through last night:
Checked the device manager to make sure there were no conflicts or
problems.
Ran Nero's tool kit on the CD & DVD drives to make sure they were
recognized and operational. They were
Went to MS website to verify XP is current. It is.
Had him try different source & target cd's.

What I plan on doing this morning:

1.) Check the device manager to make sure the devices are "working"
2.) Check system resources, see what is being loaded at startup.
3.) Open the case and make sure all cables are firmly attached, that
memory is securly seated, and that the powersupply is sufficient.
4.) Determine the make of the optical drives and check their websites for
help.
5.) Clean the lens of the optical drives.

Any other troubleshooting tips?

Thanks,
David
Click to expand...
Shutting down all other running programs, like antivirus software and
firewall etc, before the burning, would be another.

Jon
 
Check out the Event Viewer as well. You may find a message or two in there
that will point you in the right direction. Event Viewer is under:
Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools
This sort of behavior should have generated Warnings or Errors at the time
of the problems (all entries are timestamped).

Another good thing about this is that you can also look to see when the
errors started occurring (assuming this hasn't always been occurring); which
might help narrow down what may have been installed or changed to cause the
problem.
 
Thanks for the help guys, unfortunately it didn't result in anything.

I did disable Norton AV before burning or copy from one cd to the other, the
event log was fairly clean witht the exception of an indication that memory
wasn' being released properly. He didn't have any spyware software
installed to disable so I quickly installed adaware and only found a bunch
of tracking cookies, and as far as drivers, there are none. Voltage looked
good at the connector, there's 512mb of Ram on a AMD XP2400+.

One action that did succeed was to rip from a cd to the harddrive and then
burned from the hard drive to the cd. I also had one good cd to cd burn
using Nero. But the other dozen or so attempts resuted in a failure. Also
tried the operations in safe mode with a little more success but still had
several failures.

I'm willing to pull drives out of my tower and try them in his, but I
suspect the drives aren't the problem.

The problems seem to have begun after he took it to someone else to have his
HD upgraded to alarger size. He doesn't know what the other person did, but
he does know he lost some data in the process. BTW... the friend I'm
helping is an older gentleman that's not very computerate literate...

So I suspect that it had something to do with the drive replacement. I
wonder if starting from scratch and reloading XP is worth the effort?

Maybe I should also start by running docmem to verify that the memory is
good, and I think I have some sort of diagnostic software on my PC here, but
can't rememeber what is is or where I filed it? Or is something like this
beyond software?

Thanks for the input,
David
 
Just a thought, but since this previous drive issue has anyone made sure
any hidden instances of the CD drives and DVD drives have been removed?
 
Where would I look? I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in My
Computer or the Device Manager, and the Nero toolkit didn't identify any
erroneous drives. And I didn't see any virtual DVD drives such as what I
used to have on my PC.

Thanks,
David
 
Device Manager, View, Show Hidden
Where would I look? I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in My
Computer or the Device Manager, and the Nero toolkit didn't identify any
erroneous drives. And I didn't see any virtual DVD drives such as what I
used to have on my PC.

Thanks,
David
Click to expand...
 
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