CD Drives and viruses

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Hi

I've been asked to look at a friends computer because her dvd rw is playing up. Basically as far as windows is concerned it simply isn't there. The eject button opens it and disks spin in it but thats all. could this be caused by a virus?

Thanks

Lee

 

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Hi there. I don't know much on this subject but sorry if I'm stating the obvious. Have you checked BIOS to see if is selected as a Primary or secondary drive. I've done this before and it tok me hours to figure it out.

 

I had a very similar problem last week. What caused me the most befuddlement was that both my DVD drives were showing fine in BIOS and had been working no problem for months when all-of-a-sudden, they stopped showing up in Windows.

After half a day trying to reinstall drivers for them and a load of other stuff, I finally plumped for a repair installation but found neither drive would boot a disk. As the problem was with both drives, I was dumping myself thinking that my motherboard was screwed. To elimnate everything else before I went down that road, I happened to try a different IDE cable and lo and behold, it's all working fine. There's no obvious damage to the old cable so I'm not really any the wiser as to what the problem was without testing the old cable in a different rig.

So basically, try the drive in a non-Windows environment, eg. Linux, or boot to a CD, try the IDE cable, check the power connections, think about the possibility it could be the motherboard. You could try a different drive if you have a spare as well.

 

There are all sorts of things that can cause this, and some of them depend on the version of Windows, which you forgot to mention!

First thing I usualy try is booting with a Win98SE boot disk and select the menu option with CD drivers. This tells me if the drive is electricaly OK. Inserting a CD then tells me if the drive is functioning.

Under XP there are a number of known ways that this can happen, but most of them are down to user action such as upgrading etc. What was the user doing just before this happened? You can often do a rollback to just before then.

Does the drive appear in the Device Manager? If so what comments are made about it?

Harry.

 

yes i have had a virus make a optical drive disppear.. once i removed it the drive came back.. but this might not be your case, have you checked the cable is okay like the guys have mentioned? also check your jumpers!

 

Quite often the virus problem makes the cd drive unusable only when the virus is partly removed. It inserts a software layer in the stack, and when that item can't be found Windows doesn't build the stack.

There are a number of tools about to reset it in these cases.

However - I'd rather get confirmation that the drive is physicaly working first before trying advanced stuff like this!

Harry.

 

It's win xp home edition. I can't access the bios. It's an emachines 8210, anybody know how to access the bios?

Thanks

 

Ideally find out what BIOS you have. Pheonix, Award or American Megatrend by looking for the logo on boot up.
If it is a desktop try bouncing the F12, Delete or the Escape key when you restart the machine.

 

did you load starf*ck? that prog emulates non orig cd/dvd games to bypass the protection, sometimes that can literally kill your drive.

 

F1, F2 or Del are popular choices for getting into the BIOS. But why do you need to?

Harry.

 

Hi guys

i've fixed that.It was the cable between the system board and cd-drive. I have a new problem.I updated to windows xp service pack 2and now windows wont load. It gets halfway through loading then reboots.This continues in a loop tilli sitch it off. It loads fine in safe mode though. I've tried uninstalling service pack 2 but still get the same problem. I've even tried reinstalling windows from a disk to repair any faults but once it starts the setup and needs to reboot I get the same cycle.

Ready to pull my hair out now.

Can somebody help?

Thanks

 

2 ideas:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/878474/

and

 

Thanks. I'll try some of the suggested ideas. Just a couple of thoughts. The computer doesn't have Nero on, and is a new machine bought about 2 years ago. Why would the hardware on a new machine become incompatible from one service pack to another?

Also, since I have now removed service pack 2, shouldn't it work the way it did prior to installing it? I have tried to reinstall with a win xp disk, but because it is older than service pack 2 it won't install. When I removed the service pack it starts to install (no repair option) but when it needs to reboot we're back to square one

 

I had an XP computer do this to me recently. I couldn't use any of the tools I needed ie Safe Mode, LKG, VGA, it happened after doing Windows critical updates. It would also constantly re-boot at mup.sys when going into Safe Mode but I doubt mup.sys was the culprit. Weird, I couldn't do a repair either

My solution, after faffing around for hours, was to back up all their data and format the HDD and start again. It worked fine after that. I found no real answers as to why this happens, but like _omni_'s post above I tried everything known to man. I only ever re-install a clean OS if it is absolutely necessary. In this case I had no other option.

Edit: Forgot to mention that when I did re-install the OS, I was able to do *all* the critical updates without the problem rearing it's ugly head again

 

Seems to be the exact same problem I had. I eventually have had to format and clean install. Works fine now, updates and all.

Thanks for all the help guys.