CD/DVD rom drive problems.

Posted by: Tony Lockhart on 17 October 2006

Ok, I hope I can remember everything here.

My PC was working ok except for the CDR drive. It was assigned a drive letter in My Computer but if I put a disc in one of the following happened: With a home CDR total size and free space appear the same size (Eg. 420Mb total and 420Mb free...) or with a shop bought CD 0 bytes is shown for total and free. In each case I can't view the contents.

So, I thought maybe it's about to pack up. I bought a new Lite On DVD burner. Fitted, windows (XP) recognises it and loads software, new hardware ready to use...... same problem.

I've changed the IDE cable, juggled the RAM around, still the same.

The strange thing is that if I put a blank CDR in I can burn photo's to the disc and all appears normal. Remove the disc, reinsert and nothing... can't view the contents but the total and free space are there again, same Mb. Then, really weird, Nero lets me burn more photo's to the disc.. I don't know for sure whether the original photo's are on there but Nero says they are. So I burned more on, disc out, disc in, same again.



What on earth is going on here? Has some software gone missing from somewhere?



Any help MUCH appreciated,



Tony
Posted on: 17 October 2006 by Deane F
Can you try one of the disks you've burnt in another computer and drive? That is probably the first step I'd take on a troubleshooting path.
Posted on: 17 October 2006 by Deane F
Oh, and what software did XP load for an IDE device?
Posted on: 17 October 2006 by Tony Lockhart
Thanks,

I'm going to try your first suggestion at work tomorrow.
Then I'm going for a re-install of Windows as the PC does boot from the CD first if I tell it to, and it reads the CD then. So I think I'm right in saying it's a software problem.

Looking back, in the middle of July we had some very near misses with lightning strikes. Our phone lines, power lines , dect phone, adsl filter and NAP180 were all taken out by the surges. The PC was completely unplugged but perhaps some induced energy did some damage. Not long after that I had a serious virus problem. Maybe I'm just clearing the tail-end of a load of related trouble....

Tony
Posted on: 20 October 2006 by Tony Lockhart
Well, as we thought, a re-install of XP got the thing working again.

Tony