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General discussion

cd drive problems

by jacquid1 Apr 25, 2004 4:29PM PDT

I was having problems with my cd drive - sometimes wasn't reconised, sometimes wouldn't open, most of the time didn't reconise that there was a CD in it and often flashed and made whirring noises which froze the whole computer.

After a little research (on this site and other tech help sites) I decided it was time for a new drive.

The new drive worked like a dream until the first restart - now it treats every CD as though it is blank - it appears to attempt to read it, but decides that it is blank - so does nothing. It is recognising that there is a CD in it and opens fine every time- more than what the old drive was doing.

Does any one have any idea what might be going on and how I can fix it?

My system is Windows ME

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2 Posts

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Re:cd drive problems

by frankzxcv Apr 25, 2004 5:20PM PDT

how's the cable? - fj

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Re:Re:cd drive problems

by jacquid1 Apr 30, 2004 1:11PM PDT

I'm very new at this so it has all been a steep learning curve.

I have swapped the IDE cables around and plugged the hard drive and cd in every combination I can think of - and as the hard drive keeps working - I'm guesssing the cables are fine.

I did discover that if I booted with the "recovery CD-rom" in the 'problem drive'- it worked fine - i.e.no reading problems. If I cancelled to Dos I could get it to list (DIR) the contents of the CD (something that doesnt happen when going through the MS-Prompt from Windows - where it stil thinks the CD is empty) - so this leads me to think its a software problem.

I used the recovery cd to refresh "windows OS" but this has made no difference.

Shall I try reinstalling windows?

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