utterly baffled

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Wed Sep 17, 2003 7:10 pm

Have a DVD ROM and CD/RW in my machine. Simultaneously, both lost the ability to read a disc. Was burning cd's and playing throne of bhaal about midnight last night and today neither drive reads disc.

Weirder still, I can still write discs with the CD/RW (provided I am writing HDD data and not a disc from the DVDROM). Then, when the write is complete, the CD/RW is unable to read what was just written to the disc.

No new hardware has been installed since they last worked and no new software has been installed either.

It isn't a problem of cleaning, I doubt, since the CD/RW is rarely used. Plus the CD/RW just is almost new.

When a disc is popped into either drive, the PC recognizes the disc as the mouse icon becomes a CD, the motors turn on the drive and then it sits there. Opening windows explorer and highlighting the drive just pulls up the interrupt "Please insert a disc into drive.

So, I'm confused and just looking to see if anyone has any other ideas.

Haven't put a different drive in the system but plan to.

Removing and reinstalling the hardware did nothing.

Discs work in other optical drives on other systems in the house.

No voodoo has been perfomed recently in my office.

Xandax · Post by **Xandax** » Wed Sep 17, 2003 10:16 pm

This is indeed strange.

You say you have other systems in the house?

What you should try is transfering the drives in question to another system, and see if that system can't read from the drives either.
If they can't it seems to be the drives that have somehow gone wierd ... if they can then try to install one of the drives on the other controller (if it is IDEs) that you used previously. That is if your DVD was connected to IDE1, then try IDE2, or if both were on IDE2, then try IDE1 or something.

But try installing one/both drives (one at the time) on another system if you have the chance first.

Otherwise, I have little ideas.

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Thu Sep 18, 2003 8:04 am

Whoa!

Removed current drives from system, installed new optical drives including a cd-rom and a cd-r. Again, both drives were unable to read disks but I was able to write another disk using the freshly installed cd-r.

Put the original failing drives in another system, and, not to my surprise, they worked just fine. All along here, I didn't think there was anything wrong with the drives.

So, I swapped all drives back to their original systems but I forgot to swap jumpers so my optical drives wound up not showing up. Powered down again, make sure jumpers were seated properly (master, slave, blahblahblah), powered up, drives installed, drives read discs as if nothing had happened.

The ultimate in weirdness and a colossal waste of time. Oddly enough, I also similar problems with the NIC misbehaving and after hours of troubleshooting, original started working like nothing wrong had happened.

Perhaps windows is a corrupted mess, maybe the system board has some ailing electronics or firmware. Don't know but this still leaves me baffled even though I got to install and try out ToEE. Thanks for the reply Xan.

Xandax · Post by **Xandax** » Thu Sep 18, 2003 8:39 am

Re: Whoa!

Could/Can maybe have been a loose connection (cable sitting crooked or something) or maybe bad cables/controllers.

HighLordDave · Post by **HighLordDave** » Thu Sep 18, 2003 9:18 am

Your IDE controllers may have got batty. You might try flashing the BIOS or swapping the HDD from an identical machine to see if it's your Windows system drivers.

As a last resort, I recommend getting drunk, holding a wild carnal keg party and ritually sacrificing a Tomagochi to the Computer Gods in hopes of appeasing them for some past techno-offense you may have committed.

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Thu Sep 18, 2003 11:43 am

I think I've found my new tool for computer troubleshooting. It's called a reciprocating saw or in more common terms, a sawz all. Bought me one of 'dem circuit board blades at the home depot. Next time it gets out of line...bad things will happen.

HighLordDave · Post by **HighLordDave** » Thu Sep 18, 2003 12:29 pm

Have you ever considered an M-80 or a blasting cap?

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Thu Sep 18, 2003 1:00 pm

I have but I prefer to hold the instrument of maiming as opposed to blowing stuff up. I leave the latter to Michael Bay. He really seems to enjoy it.