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CD-ROMs Failing In Win2k & XP Boxes?
jptechnical writes "I have an interesting hardware/software development brewing. I have a friend with a computer shop down the way and he has had a rash of nearly a dozen Win2k & XP boxes come through with disabled or missing CD-ROM drives. They work in DOS, and are bootable, but are either disabled, not functioning or simply missing in Windows' device manager. Does anyone know of a virus that may be causing this? I cannot find any common vector from system build to software installed or anything. MS says reformat, but where's the fun in that? What resources aside from MSKB and google searching do slashdot readers use for troubleshooting strange problems?"
Well, I can tell ya the the drives failing isn't a normal problem with Win2k or XP. (At my office, it'd be my job to fix it. Never ever ran across anything like that.)
I do want to ask, though, have you tried them in safe mode? Have ya tried flushing the BIOS? Have you been able to rule out anything i.e. CD burning software?
"Derp de derp."
If it works in "DOS" that means your computer can probably boot off one of these CD's. Try booting off a Linux CD. If it works, install a Linux partition. If the CD-ROM drive works under linux, erase the Windows partition and Voila!
Working CD-ROM drive. (Also, improvement in speed and security).
Yeah, in fact, he linked it in his question.
http://www.tek-tips.com
Do some poking around over there. I usually find all sorts of help.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
i have had this problem with badly cracked versions of XP
buy it, or find a corp version without a crack
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking - H.L. Mencken
You could be in serious trouble. There was such a virus - or at least it had the powers to do what you are experiencing.
I got infected with this virus once. It caused uncontrollable cachinnation.
best web host ever
Common Vector is a technical term for "Common significant identifying traits."
When you determine the common vector for a system failure like this you find the "common" symptom that points to a common problem and therefore can be fixed.
~foooo
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
I had this same problem with my plextor, reinstalled xp (dead hdd) and it's working again.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
When I saw this I was wondering if it is a windows or a hardware problem. What happens for example if he boots using a Knoppix CD, can he see the CDROM then ?
Being able to boot and work off MSDOS is just a basic confidence test and once you load up something a bit more meaty things sometimes start to go wrong. Some other thoughts:
Bad batch of motherboards or IDE cables ?
Bad batch of power supplies or very cheap PSUs that can't handle the load? I've seen REAL flaky things happen when a power supply goes bad.
Virus or worm ?
This could be an interesting challenge.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
I usually see this kind of thing when the motherboard drivers aren't loaded. have you tried updating the drivers (copy with DOS on the HDD!)
Did these machines work then all of a sudden not, or DOA?
I'd bet that the BIOS isn't recognizing the CD Drive type and Windows 2K/Xp freaks out about it.
Have him check to see if the BIOS is recognizing anything on that IDE chain. If not, set it to auto detect and that should do the trick.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
A couple years back I had a couple slot loading DVD's fail. The second seemed like a mechanical problem, so I opened it up and found a floppy disk, scraps of paper, and some thin plastic toys that belonged to my two year old. Same errata with my bride's drive. YMMV
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Q. What resources aside from MSKB and google searching do slashdot readers use for troubleshooting strange problems?"
A. I just post a question to ask slashdot, and have all the geeks trying to avoid troubleshooting at their jobs do it for me.
Tips:
When searching for a Microsoft document, don't use the Microsoft search engine. It's terrible. Use Google, with as part of the search parameters.
I agree. It sounds like a virus.
Certainly the first thing to do is to discover if the BIOS is seeing the drives, which it is if you can see the drive in DOS.
If it's not a virus, suspect human involvement. Maybe someone ran the same program on all the computers. Such as a screen saver, for example. It would be very much like someone with no computer experience to run a screen save they got off the internet and to forget that they did it.
I was going to mod that up after checking through that site for a bit, but then I noticed that the websites icon is a pink star... So instead of moderating I was forced to comment and make mention that I can't have a bookmark with a pink star. Sorry that I can't mod you up! Tete
That's scary.
...but use a linux cd
;-)
I have a copy of "linux 9" I'll sell ya
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I had the same problem with a liteon dvd drive. It worked for months, and then one day, while ripping a cd (Diana Krall : Live in paris, if you want the exact cd) and halfway through the rip it failed. Windows still saw the cdrom, the BIOS picked it up, I could see it in linux, and use it in linux, and it was still bootable. However, whenever I tried to browse a cd in windows, it would say "Please insert a disk in drive D:" or whatever the error was. The way I fixed it was to pull the driver out of device manager, shut down the machine, take out the DVD drive, and throw in my girlfriends drive (some old burner). Windows started up, burner showed up, and worked fine. Did the same removal process witht he burner, re-installed the DVD drive, and everything worked again. I've had the same problem twice since then, and both times it was fixed the same way. I don't know if that helps or not, but it's what worked for me.
My problem's intermittent though. My DVD drive occasionally doesn't get picked up by Windows XP on boot, but when I reboot, it's fine. The BIOS always sees it, as does Linux.
I hate Windows.
Miri it is whil Linux ilast...
Open the device manager, uninstall your CD-ROM drive, the IDE controllers, and all the drivers under System devices. Then restart. Your OS will probably make you reboot a few times while it reinstalls things, but when everything is over you should have your CD back.
Adding to my post above, also see this article: Display All Devices That Are Connected to a Windows XP-Based Computer
Sorry I don't have the details handy, but I had a similar problem once on win98. It turned out that *somehow* a registry bit had been turned on that hid the CDROM drive. It was easy to fix once I found the problem, but I still have no idea what caused it.
I hear that Mandrake Linux 9.2 suffers from this vulnerability too.
What resources aside from MSKB and google searching do slashdot readers use for troubleshooting strange problems?
Why, "Ask Slashdot", of course! Hell, oftentimes people just skip the first two resources you listed and just go directly to option #3.
GMD
watch this
It looks more purple than pink.
What resources aside from MSKB and google searching do slashdot readers use for troubleshooting strange problems?
Try some online forums. I suggest www.tek-tips.com and www.experts-exchange.com. There are usually tons of helpful people on those boards. Just remember to help other users solve their problems as well.
Back around 1995 or 1996, the high school I attended got hit by the AntiEXE and AntiCMOS viruses (virii?). I don't remember which one it was, but one (if not both) of these caused the MS-DOS CD-ROM driver to fail to recognize the attached IDE CD-ROM drive on some (not all) of the computers. After removing the virus, the CD-ROM drives worked again.
...I had my DVD drive on my XP box half crap out on me. For some reason it spontaneously stopped playing DVDs. I had just taken out a DVD that played fine, and put in another DVD and it wouldn't recognize that there was a disc in the drive. No other DVDs would play either. It would still recognize audio CDs and CD-ROMs. I did the usual stuff: reinstalled drivers and such. Eventually, I just did a firmware upgrade on the drive and it's been fine since.
It happened to me somewhat like described: I installed iTunes, and in the process of installing its drivers for burning, it ate my CDRW and CDROM drives. It seems that the driveres conflicted in some fashion, but i didn't stick around long enough to find out: i used the system restore point set just before iTunes was installed and went back to a working setup.
C
--
Democracy would work just fine if people weren't so goddamned stupid.
I also have an interesting issue, don't know if it is related. My parents have an EIDE cdrom and a SCSI scanner on an adaptec card. If I use a scanner first, then the CD drive will never activate, and windows complains that a device is not found. If I use a cd first, then a scanner will not work. Strangely, setting some cd option in cdex allows it to rip a cdrom anyway, but windows still does not see it.
Weird.
badness 10000
I noticed not too long ago that both my DVD and CDRW now appear under device manager under the 'Unknown Device' branch rather than CD/DVD drives or whatever it usually is.
Things I can think of that seem vaguely relevant...
-Music CD's that install a CD driver to do copy protection.
-Virus.. if *my* problem is viral, it isn't detected by AVG.
-New VIA 4in1's (not likely)?
After updating your definitions. That might be a good first step.
You're welcome.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
http://aumha.org/downloads/cdgone.zip
Sheesh.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Sorry I don't have anything constructive to offer on this situation, but I'm watching this to see if anybody finds anything. Something just came up to me the other day and asked for help with this, describing the exact same problem. Also he told me that he got jerked around by HP tech support for a while before he gave up on them trying to figure out the issue :P.
There could be some filter driver causing some havoc in the file IO stack. Does your IT group install any software (antivirus, CD burning, etc) that adds any filter drivers? Check out the %windir%\system32\drivers directory. If there are new .sys files that were added around the time the trouble started that may be your culprit.
Communism was just a red herring.
It must be a DRM feature to prevent you from pirating music.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
DVD drives magically pulling a disappearing act happened to me yesterday on XP. The article listed below describes cd burning software being the culprit, while in my case it was video capturing software/drivers.e fault.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;314060&Product=winxp
http://support.microsoft.com/d
Aside from the obvious software issues, I've had these while using inferior power supplies. When things start humming and more juice was being used, my removable drives would suddenly disappear.
Upon a reboot, they would miraculously return, but quite often went away again after a heavy burning operation of something similar. Putting a decent Antec power supply in fixed things up... guess the drives weren't getting enough juice under the old one.
it's probably that virus they call Roxio Easy CD Creator. The only known cure is Nero Burning ROM.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I've encountered a couple of issues where a removeable usb CD-Rom\DVD drive is not reinitialised when reattached to a Windows PC after having been used once and disconnected without rebooting the machine.
Device manager shows the error code "Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware because a previous instance of the device driver is still in memory. (Code 38)" The knowlege base solution to this problem is "Restart the computer" which is not very helpful.
In the first instance I traced the problem to an additional filter driver installed on the CD device by the CD burning software "B's Recorder Gold" made by BHA. Using the devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices trick I was able to uninstall this driver and the drive behaved normally again. A report to BHAs support department has resulted in no response.
The additional driver did allow me to rip mp3s from a so called "protected" audio CD, so it wasn't totally useless.
The second instance of the problem I found to be caused by Daemon tools virtual CD software. This was harder to track down. When removeing the CD drive the drive icon would disappear for a few seconds and then reappear even without the drive connected. Attempts to access the drive would result in error messages, but the drive itself would hand around.
I think windows should tell you which of the several drivers it is trying to load for a device, is causing the problem.
The removeable storage architecture in windows NT seems to be pretty complex. There are many layers at which problems can occur and it is difficult to find out where the issue lies. I would suspect the issue is just a misconfiguration somewhere rather than hardware damage or the actions of a virus.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
** profit ** ???
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
I've seen this too. There is something squirrely about Win XP. It has memory management problems, it appears. If one program fails, it will sometimes corrupt the memory space of another program, or the OS itself.
(No offense to squirrels. They are cute, friendly animals. But, operating systems should not act like them.)
What resources aside from MSKB and google searching do slashdot readers use for troubleshooting strange problems?
I have a site I visit regularly that tends to have helpful advice. They even have a dedicated section for asking such things.
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
this sounds more like a joke of some kind.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Your friend should use this opportunity to make some money. He should test another CD-ROM in the system. If it shows up (different CD-ROMs have different firmware so it might work.) tell the customer they need a new CD-ROM and sell it to them. It's a though. Then take their old CD-ROM and sell it to linux and Windows NT/9X users.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
The problem is a file called "Kernel32".
It causes random BSODs, crashing, file corruption, and it enables script kiddies to compromise your system.
I've seen the old school boot sector virus Anti-cmos cause the cdroms to not work proplery.... granted i havent seen that since windows 95 maybe 98...
Such a statement is indicative of a phrase whereby which the author intends to share that he or she cannot find a common cause to the situation.
In other words, a more academic way of saying: I don't know why the fuck this shit is doing this.
Or, I can't find anything in common.
I have a particular box that experiences this problem and I've been unable to figure it out. It tri-boots windows 98SE, Windows 2000 (has also ran Windows XP Professional in place of Win2k), and Debian Sid.
This problem only shows up when I'm using win2k or winxp. I've replaced the drive, the power supply, reformatted, etc. but it keeps happening when I'm using windows 2k/xp. The ironic thing is that I have two optical drives in this computer and only the first one disappears.
i've noticed a similar problem with my creative ide cd burner on windows xp. but instead of not recognizing the device at all, it will see it at bootup, but if explorer crashes or something while trying to access the cd, the device disappears and i have to reboot to see it again.
the problem persisted after changing motherboards too.
eventually due to that and other issues i ended up just installing gentoo linux.
Computer shop eh? I'm thinking dusty storage. I've had DVD drives crap out on me because the laser lens were dirty. Gave them a good wipe and everything was fine again.
I have a CD-RW drive in my XP box that acts peculiar. It will burn 1 session on a brand new CD through Windows (though it will say that it failed, it actually worked). However, the drive will not read any CD-R's in WinXP! It does not matter where they were burned or how, it acts as though the drive is empty.
Very peculiar.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
someone need to color calibrate their monitor. Also, two major causes of DVD/CD Dissappearing are: Not loading the IDE drivers from the motherboard manufacturer. Perhaps there was a windows update recently that "Updates" some IDE Bus mastering drivers? Easy CD.
There are two types of people: those that can fill in the blanks,
I've had luck uninstalling drivers, and programs associated with such devices, and then deleting the registry keys they've left behind. Mostly with badly muffed HP USB & Multi-function machine installs under 2k. Reinstall and bingo. Like magic.
Q. What resources aside from MSKB and google searching do slashdot readers use for troubleshooting strange problems?"
A. I just post a question to ask slashdot, and have all the geeks trying to avoid troubleshooting at their jobs do it for me.
Heck, most Ask Slashdotters don't even bother with the first two options.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I saw quite a few reports of iTunes causing CDROMs to stop working. Search here in the iTunes for Windows forum for "cdrom device manager" to see some of the reports.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Refer to Roxio knowledge base EEZ000005 even if Roxio software is not or has never been installed. Since their KB is rather hard to handle, the fix is: 1. Uninstall Roxio or any other CD burning software, Iomega Hotburn (Heartburn??), or others. This is only Roxio and Microsoft's suggestion. I have used this fix MANY times and it always helps even if I don't uninstall everything related to CD writing. Many times you can't since the original software may not be available. 2. In regedit, go to HKLM, System, CurrentControlSet, Control, Class and find the following key: {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} 3. Highlight this key and in the right-hand panel find the entries for Lowerfilters and Upperfilters. Right click each of these and delete them. 4. Restart the system and the D-ROMs. CD-RWs, or DVD-RWs should be back. 5. Reinstall any software that was removed in step 1. This is always a first step to recovering lost CD devices. Another step that we use is to boot to safe mode and go to Device Manager to find and delete left over ghost devices. Sometimes we'll find several old, previously deleted devices, particularly CD devices but often video cards, NICs etc that are no lnger present or you'll find duplicates, like 3 or 4 D-ROMs when only 1 is actually present. Most often with the CD problem, we "Uninstall" all CD drives from here and let Windows re-add them cleanly on the next startup. Of course, be sure to check cable connections especially is system has been moved or shipped by UPS, etc. We also find that CD drives act better if we jumper them for Master and Slave instead of Cable Detect. If you have 2 IDE channels and use SCSI hard drives we use the primary and secondary IDE channels to seperate the CD-drives even more. Regards, Ken
That worked for me...l ass\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BB FC1-08002BE10318}r olSet002\Control\Cl ass\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BB FC1-08002BE10318}e ntControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11C E-BFC1-08002BE10318}
remove the dependencies of the folowing keys (but NOT the keys) after uninstall the apps... HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\C
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Cont
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Curr
\m/
Chipset drivers. XP on reading errors will slow the drive down to compensate. Problem is some chipset drivers do not set the speed back, and this can cause similar problems to his. The most common result is very very slow performance on the device. Go the the control panel and under the IDE device and remove the device. Restart and windows will restore the device and the proper settings. To fix completely update the device drivers.
I found that in some cases of pcs running win2kpro (for dell and ibm). If I boot the machines without a disk in the cdr, the device does not show up. If I boot the pc with a failed burn disk in the drive, windows finds the mechanism. I don't have this problem with CDRW.
While I recognize that they work in dos... being as to the fact that these all seem confined to one geographic area... there might have been some sort of a weird ass power surge. Just my 3.14 cents.
i've seen this problem a bit to, WinXP has a spack if the harddrive is not master or if the cdrom is higher in the chain, set the hdd to /dev/hda and the cdrom to /dev/hdc. /dev/hdd and the cdrom /dev/hdb.
;D
i first came across this problem when they installed the hdd
i also had a client that brought his system in because the cdrom wasn't working and it turn out to be that someone unpluged it and installed a crack version of XPpro but he said he knew nothing about that(maybe the pixies did it) so to stop this type of happening again i think i might have to kill some pixies
eAt mORe huMAN -[sVen]
It depends very much on your hardware. Visit the manufacturer's website and look for a firmware upgrade.