Hi, For a while now my pc has been requesting me to insert the windows vista installation disk and perform a repair; about every 2 or 3 days. Although an inconvenience, I could usually complete the repair in under 10 minutes and have vista loaded. Here's where the problem is.... The pc boots and requests a repair but my DVD-ROM and DVD-RW drives won't open and the led's won't flash meaning i can't get past the page asking me to insert a repair disk. The cd drives open and close and flash when connected to the power only, but as soon as i connect them to the motherboard they become lifeless. Any help much appreciated. motherboard- asus p5q cpu - Intel E8400 RAM - Corsair Dominator pc8500 DDR2 1GBx2 VISTA 64bit
I think you simply forgot to attach the power cable to your DVD drive. Check for that. And if you have a modular PSU, check if the power cable is well inserted on the power supply unit itself. Else it's broken, and need to be replaced.
If you only have one socket I assume it's IDE. Do the drives open when the PC is posting? Two things to try. Firstly make sure your jumper settings are correct (master/slave or cable select) and try a new IDE cable as yours may be damaged. Also try operating only one drive at the same time (again making sure you have the jumpers set as master). In addition, IDE is enabled in the BIOS?
True, but with a faulty cable (or other problems) the firmware may override an eject request. It's rather unlikely that two drives would fail to respond so I suspect it's a IDE cable or controller issue.
You'll either have to boot from a USB stick or another hard disk (with a Windows install prepared using another system). However the big question IMHO is why your system was requesting a repair install every few days. I would be strongly inclined to suspect malware at work (in particular, something tinkering with your boot sector or even the BIOS since it seems to be surviving a repair) and would suggest you either try a fresh Windows install from USB, or take the hard disk out and check it for malware using another PC.
+1 to that, I had my system not even detecting the DVD drives after POST. I used an external USB DVD drive for the reinstall rather than USB stick though, it may be worth seeing if you can borrow one from someone first to get the repair done. If you can get the system to boot I'd strongly recommend backing up your data to another drive then doing a nuke and pave - it's the only way to be sure. If you can't get the system to boot then it may be the BIOS, as AstralWanderer has suggested. Fortunately you can flash the BIOS on the P5Q series from a USB stick. That's another option should it turn out to be BIOS related rather than the OS.
This would probably be a better idea since a (read-only) CD/DVD can't be subsequently infected by malware. Alternatively, an SD card (with the write-protect slider set, once you have copied the appropriate data onto it) in a USB adaptor should do the trick too.
