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XP Pro CD/DVDs disappear

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by fadbel

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Intel P4/2GHz, 1GHz DDR, CD+R/W, DVD+R/W.
After 1 to 4 days of running, the mose starts locking for 1-20 seconds. I note the CD+R/W "Disk In" light flickering and eventually goes out. At that time, the mouse will continue to act strange but both CD and DVD drives disappear. The only recovery, reboot. Technet has no info on this.

6 replies

by fadbel

Poster rated this answer.
I'm aware of that thanks and that was taken care of ages ago.
Thanks for the response.

by baz_shaw

Does anything show up as an error in Device Manager (yellow exclamation mark)? Are all the drivers the correct ones for your o/s and updated?

You didn't say what o/s you are using, but if you have Win2K or XP, you could look at Event Viewer
(Programs/Administrative Tools) and see if any errors in the logs correspond with the problems occurring.

Might sound too obvious, but have you looked into possible physical hardware causes? Is this a new PC, or one you have built/modified yourself? Is it a recent problem, ie has the PC run for some period of time with both drives OK?
Possible h/w problems I would look at - loose/bad ribbons, power supply (check voltages when the drives disappear), jumper settings esp. if they share a ribbon (Master/Slave/CS). How about IRQ conflicts - run System Information from the System Tools menu. Anything odd in the BIOS? The mouse locking up could just be as a result of the O/S having to deal with the stalled drives.

Are you running any programs when this happens, or accessing media in the drives?

Odd problems like this usually require a process of elimination to track down. Try uninstalling/removing one of the drives and see if the other one behaves.

by fadbel

Poster rated this answer.
Unfortunately, all of these things have been checked including overheating (temps are nominal). The problem is intermittant and cannot be reproduced. Since the drivers are still in memory after the drives disappear (and they're both Yellow tagged) I suspect the CD driver, but I've updated those. These drives worked fine for over a year and the mouse as well. The only thing is multiple microsoft updates (patches) have been applied prior to the problem but none can be blamed. And the O/S is in the title of this.

by fadbel

The problem seems to have been solved by removing a CD-R/W drive from the system. Replacing with another CD R-only drive did not cause the problem to return. This seems to indicate some type of failure in the CD-R/W drive electronics; possible due to aging/overheating components. I have been running the new setup two weeks without a re-occurance of the problem.

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