Hi all:
I have a customer whose CD drives disappeared from the production servers (3 occured simultaneously). They are NT4 SP5.
I have done the following:
1. Checked disk administrator. The CD is not there at all.
2. Checked BIOS. CD wasnot disabled.
3. The CD was detected during POST.
4. The CD could boot.
5. As a matter of fact, when I insert the CD in NT, I could see light blinking, showing it recognizes and tries to read. But nothing pops up and nothing shows up on explorer.
6. The HW guys came in and checked, and pronounced the CDs healthy.
7. In Control Panel – Devices, the following were listed:
Device – atapi; Status – not started; Startup setting – Automatic
Device – cdfs; Status – not started; Startup setting – Disabled
Device – cdrom; status – not started; startup setting – boot
I checked the same location of a healthy server of identical model. It was:
Device – atapi; Status – started; Startup setting – Boot
Device – cdfs; Status – started; Startup setting – Disabled
Device – cdrom; status – started; startup setting – system
8. The Control Panel – SCSI Device setting shows atapi did not start because driver did not load.
I don’t know how the 3 servers came to be like this. I had tried to re-create the scenario in-house, but each time I got BSOD. So if someone tampered with the settings, I don’t understand how the servers can still be running in production. I would say atapi.sys is the problem since the other 2 depend on it to start up. However, I am not sure what could happen if I touch atapi.sys.
Would appreciate any advice on this. I won’t be able to install anything from CD (since the problem is the CD). Is there any safe way to restore these CD drives?
Many thanks in advance
