I'm Havin' CD ROM Issues

I have had three CD ROMs stop working in the last two weeks! One is an old HP that I really don't care about, but the other two are fairly new CD drives, they're CDU 5211's.

Here is what's been happening: I put in a CD with an autorun file, and it gives me the CD icon by my mouse pointer like it recognizes the disc, but never reads it. When I go to my computer and try to explore the CD drive, it asks me to "please insert a disc" in my CD drive. There were no new software or any other changes made to these computers, to my knowledge, in the past few weeks.

I went to sony's and other websites and got the latest drivers for the 5211, and it still does the samething. I tried to rule out a hardware problem by I putting in a bootable CD and changing the BIOS to boot from CD... It read the CD and booted from the disc, yet when I went back into Windows (XP) it still wouldn't read any discs. :mad:

Is there still any hardware issues that could be causing this problem? Or is in purely a Windows driver problem?
:confused: :confused:

Maybe there is something wrong with the actual CD that you were using??

From what I gleen from your post you cannot read a cd with any of the drives...but when you put in another CD (bootable) you can read it?

Is the cd you are trying to read a burned CD??

How about exploring your bootable cd while in windows...does that work???

can you read the problem cd in another machine???

MLF

Are you trying different CD's in the drive or just the same one?

Do you have any CD copying software installed that has the Virtual Drive utility as part of it, i.e Clone CD? If you have try disabling it or uninstalling it, see if that helps.

It's all about the quality of the reader.................. I have a quality drive that can recognize and play a scratched CD without any problems.....throw it in a Memorex piece of shite and it won't play it at all.

TIP: Reboot with cd in drive while the bios is set for "boot from cd" .....then when you log in it should still be running. That's how I used to do it.

I had this problem with one of my CD Rom's... your gonna need a new IDE cable for your CD Rom drive, at least that was the problem with mine i had a bad cable so it wasnt reading or recognizing it.

The first thing I would do is run a cleaning CD several times through the drive and clean the CDs.

I frequently encounter this problem with different CDs and drives.....................some combinations work and others don't.

It cannot be your driver..................the CD hasn't changed.

Where you can also encounter problems:

1. Poor quality CDs.
2. CDs that are "too fast" for the drive.

Just a few thoughts :)

Sorry I haven't been able to reply to your posts. Let me try to explain the problem better... I didn't do it very well the first time:

I can boot from a bootable CDs, but not read/explore it in Windows. It have tried many different CDs and none of them work. These are not burned CDs. So I don't think it's a IDE, speed, or anything like that, but I don't know.

I might need to clean it... I'll try that.

Anymore suggestions? :confused:

If were going to toss it I would take it apart and examine and clean it.....perferably the eye lens and the laser pickup assembly. Actually I'd look at everything....be carefull.

Well if it will boot from CD but won't autorun, that sounds like it cannot read the autorun program properly.

I would go for a thorough clean first.

Then take a look at your folder options and check everything "yes" for web content in the "general" section.

:)

Sure sounds like a driver problem to me, if the BIOS can see and
boot from the disk but windows can't. Maybe you should go in
to control panel and uninstall the device, and then reinstall it.
:cool:

originally posted by rcgreen

Quote:

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Sure sounds like a driver problem to me, if the BIOS can see and boot from the disk but windows can't. Maybe you should go in
to control panel and uninstall the device, and then reinstall it.

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That is what I was going to suggest. Also go to Control Panel - System and see if there is a yellow question mark on the cd rom device. Then do what rcgreen has said and it should be fine.