Mpowered

This one has got me and all my friends stumped. I'm using XP Pro with a DVD burner and a CD ROM drive. When I open My Computer, I can see the drives identified properly and all other drives/virtual drives. When I put any type of disc the drive disappears from My Computer and reappears as a regular CD drive keeping the same drive letter. This problem seems to be intermittant. Sometimes the drive works fine, sometimes it doesn't.

I don't know if there are any programs causing conflicts but I have tried to boot in without loading any non essential programs or drivers but that doesnt seem to have any effect. Sometimes the drives will work right after I start up then stop working later. The only programs I can think of that might have caught a conflict is AnyDVD or iTunes. I have uninstalled AnyDVD a long time ago.

I also tried to uninstall the drives and reboot but that didn't do anything either.

Any ideas on what can be going on?

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Joshua

Very strange problem you got there! I would lean towards one of the programs you've installed replaced the rom driver that comes with windows. Have you tried right clicking on the drive in Device Manager, choose properties, click the drivers tab, then choose the "rollback" option?

This would rollback the driver to whatever was installed before the current one. Could be worth a shot.

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seqiro

A lot of strange things can happen to CD burners in Windows XP. There was a hotfix (Q309691) that could mess things up if it was applied to a drive that didn't need it.

Are you currently upgraded to Service Pack 1? If not, give that a go and see if it resolves it.

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LPMiller

Programs like itunes or music match sometimes 'lock' out the cd drives for there own personal use, and this may be what's happening. When they lock out the drives, you can't access them at all, and sometimes the don't give you the drives back till you reboot.

Other programs, such as creative's autoloading can do the same thing - they take priority, looking for music cd's, and lock out the drive.

Disable or unistall any music program. For itunes, you can just go into msconfig and disable it's start up program.

You can also rearrange your power supply leads a little bit, so that the drives draw their own power and don't share with a floppy, fan or video card. If they can't draw enough juice, you can have this problem as well.

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Mpowered

SnotRocket, I tried the rollback driver option but there was no driver to roll back to.

seqiro, I already have SP1 installed. Plus this problem is also affecting my regular CDRom drive as well.

LPMiller, I never use Creative bloatware when possible and disabled iTunes. I can't think of any other programs I use that would try to hijack optical drives. I'll try the power supply thing when I get home.

Thanks for the suggestions

johnnymk

I am not sure if this will help:

If you have installed other CDROMs or CDRWs and then replaced them, the burning program may be looking for a unit which is no longer there. I have had this problem occasionally.

If you go to SAFEMODE and then Device Manager, click on the CDROM to check if there are a bunch of units which are no longer being used and then Delete them.

Also, I use an old version of ENDITALL, which is less bloated than the newer versions to check what is running in the background. I usually just let ENDITALL stop any possible conflicts which may occur while burning.

Also, do you have AUTO INSERT disabled for each of the writers? It's called something else in Windows XP??

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Mpowered

I tried the safemode thing but I couldn't find any unused drives. Both of the drives which I have were installed before I installed XP but I tried it anyways. I also tried ENDITALL but couldn't find any programs that should be using the drives. Thanks anyways johnny.

If I boot up with a disc in the tray it works but when I take it out the drives stop working.

At this point it looks like I may have to format and reinstall. I just wanted to avoid doing that because practically everything else is working properly. Plus I'd really like to know how to fix it if possible. Please keep the ideas coming.

seqiro

Did you try to remove the IDE channel(s) on which the drives are located in Device Manager, reboot, let Windows redetect and reinstall the IDE drivers, and then make sure the are running in DMA mode (as opposed to PIO)?

XP can get finicky about this.

I don't know if it will HELP, but it's worth a shot.

Mpowered

I tried removing the IDE channels but that didn't fix it. For some reason though, when I put a blank disc in, I can burn to it, but not read from it. I burned the QNX iso just fine and booted to it but I can't read the disc in windows.
I also noticed that when I insert a disc, it is identifing the file system as RAW instead of CDFS. Same for a DVD.

Mpowered

I tried uninstalling the individual drives in Windows, then removing the secondary IDE channel, shutting down, unplugging the IDE cable from the mother board. Restarting the computer without the drives so it would reinstall the secondary IDE channel then rebooting with the drives attached. Still no luck. Anyone else have any ideas? This is really driving me crazy!

Joshua

Format C: /s
reinstall windows

Mpowered

Yeah, I'm really trying to avoid that. Plus it would be nice if I could fix it if I ever see it in the future.

seqiro

Out of curiosity, have you checked for a virus? At this point, it seems like anything could be possible.

When was everything last working? Might be worth trying to do a complete System Restore to an earlier restore point.

Mpowered

I have checked for viruses with Norton and anything that could be found by the latest Ad-Aware and SpyBot. I didn't find anything at all. I think I'm just going to format and reinstall since I have a few more days off and don't like the way my hard drive is currently partitioned.

Thanks for all the help anyways everyone. And if there are any more ideas please keep them coming.

Mpowered

I just noticed something that hasn't happened before. The same problem that is affecting my physical drives is also now affecting virtual drives. Any time I load an image the same thing happens.

johnnymk

Did you try disabling AutoInsert Notication yet?

Mpowered

I tried that. It didn't seem to have any effect on it.

Mpowered

I guess I ran into some good luck. Somehow the drives started to work again. Since I don't have a ton of time to do a complete reinstall I have just let it go. But a friend of mine gave me a copy of knoppix to use to watch a DVD and after I finished watching it and rebooted back in to XP the drives just started working again. Hope it stays like this!