Hi everyone! I'm having a really wierd problem with my CD-Rom drives. When I boot XP, it will only ever read from a drive that contains a disk on boot. If the drive is empty, Windows will see it as empty until next time I boot up. If there is a disc in there, it will work fine for the rest of the session. On the other hand, it will write to the drive fine. This doesn't happen on my Windows 2000 system, so I suspect it's a driver problem. Anyone got any suggestions as to where I could start looking for a fix? Google has failed me, so I don't really know where to go next! Here's hoping for a solution!
do you know what the make of the drive is? you could try using AIDA32 or some thing similar to find out the drive's details to make it easier to find drivers. If it isnt driver problem i suggest checking the cables and possibly setting the jumper to "cable Select". Hope this helps
Put the drive on cable select, make sure in your BIOS you set where the cd-rom is on it's respecting IDE cable as "CDROM" and not "NONE", and if all that fails, try putting the drive on slave, and putting a hdd before it on the IDE cable, I've heard of that fixing this problem before.
Thanks everyone... Here's what I've found out so far... My DVD drive is a generic 16X DVD My DVD-RW drive is an Optorite DVD RW DD0401 The drives work fine under my Win 2000 system, and are detected fine in the bios. I can only ever read from either drive if there is a disc in it when I login. If I boot with an empty drive, then Windows sees that drive as empty from then on. It detects discs being put in (the mouse-pointer changes to the "pointer and cd" image), but still thinks that drive is empty when I try and open it. If I logoff, and login again, with the disc in the drive, then Windows will read it fine, and I can change discs etc. with no trouble at all. The *really* odd thing is that I have the same problem with my virtual DVD drive as well - If I mount an image on an existing drive, it remains empty, but if I create a new drive then that one will work fine until the next reboot. I'm begining to think there must be a setting/service/something in Windows that stops it checking properly for a disc in the drive... but I'll try updateing all the IDE drivers as well!
Humm, it sounds more like a bad install of XP, try throwing a spair hdd in there and throw xp onto that, and see if the drives register
Yeah, I think it is a problem with just XP, since the dual booting Win2000 works fine - I'll have to check the "XP home" install as well, but I believe that works fine too. I really want to fix the error without re-installing though, since I've only just got everything setup from the last time I re-installed! I guess it's not too bad, all I really have to do is leave a cd in the drive at all times... but it's still not a happy computer
Is your AV software up to date? If so and its scanned the disks with no viruses then i say its XP also.
