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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."
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
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
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.
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 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.
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
Just don't install Mandrake if you've got a LG drive.
Reference for above comment for those that didn't pay attention last time around.
And the followup story with the fix.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Using a bootable linux CD to see if the problem is hardware or software related would be a good start to solving the problem.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Your mileage may vary
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.
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.
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,
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