To explain a bit better perhaps.
1) Yes the machine is old (disability means making do). This is an old DELL OPTIPLEX P4 300Ghx machine on XP PRO
2) The drive worked very well for everything for a long time. Then I installed new software and did not write anything for about a month (when I notices it no longer worked). The time lag plus the new software makes the problem harder to pin down
3) I can see the drive in explorer. I can 'right click' to look at it's properties. I cannot read anything.
4) I have updated : the boards chipset drivers, teh boards BIOS (from A07 to A11), and also the USB update for the system.
5) I know that it could be a ... and fluke that the lasers both died (together) in the month after I installed some new DVD software for making ISOs out of DVDs ... regardless of their region (the joys of changing nations)
Note that I had not REBOOTED until a day later - after that software install. So any driver changes would not have kicked in yet and would have gone unnoticed that day (when burning was still OK). I then promptly forgot about the software change wcghi was also supposed to iron out some problem with (this is suspect) and wrote no more disks for a while - when I discovered the problem
According to the tool : aspichk.rar, my ASAPI is *NOT* OK and parts have been replaced with older versions. I have no idea how to get all the newest ones, and ASAPI has always been sort of dodgy on XP.
There is a program called "forceaspi17.rar" which claims to fix this (with no guarantees of course)
However it could be just as bad, and I THINK it might have been run way back when the whole thing began....you see I cannot be certain as I have serious memory issues - were worse a few months back (these are from disability, which is why I no longer am a senior IT person)
again 0 I have no idea where to get the ASAPI stuff that is proper
I also tried this quick fix :
I disabled the device in the hardware manager and rebooted the machine.
This is SUPPOSED to reload the correct drivers if any files involved are corrupted - BUT - how do I *REALLY* know that windows did this? I was never asked for a drive location on reboot. "New HARDWARE Found" ought to do that, unless it is falling back to a know driver (and that could easily be bad). It could *NOT* have gone to the CABs on its own, as I am on SP3 and it would have had to go off to "C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386"... or I would have had to pout in the XPP RO CD to the USB DVD drive.
yet it did not ask me for a location....