Optical drives

[Guest]

Good evening/morning. I had an OS problem and had to wipe and reinstall XP SP3. My E: and F: drives no longer read any form of media- they are LiteOn IDE's that are only 3-4 mos old and worked fine until the shop worked on the machine yesterday. Device manager says they are recognized and fine- I tried the uninstall and reboot trick and got the 'new hardware added' message in the notification area, however music cd's nor software discs start up. The light stays lit for approx 10 seconds then goes out. I can go to start/run/E: or F:/ rt. click on the music track/lft click play and it works fine. I am hoping someone here would be kind enough to help me out. I am very leery of the shops in this area and none of the tech's are cert'd properly. I have had no virus or malware issues, either. I believe the wipe/install was totally unwarranted and was applied without my approval to the tune of $100. I only ordered a $25 diagnostics study for a RAM chnl issue.
System as follows:
Compaq Presario SR1426NX-2005
Mobo: Asus goldfish3-oem
CPU: Intel Pentium4 Prescott 2.93Ghz
HD: Seagate 160Gb SATA
PS: Corsair VX450W
Video Card: PNY vcg84512speb GS8400 nvidia graphics
Memory: 2 x 1Gb PC3200 in 2 &4 slots- 1 & 3 are empty because #3 is out and affected the
whole channel
Please help an old guy out....Thanks much

 

[Emperus]

Try changing the drive letters..

 

[Appzalien]

It sounds like they turned off your autorun capabilities. With autorun off even install disks with the autorun.inf file on them will not start by themselves, you have to go in and double click the setup.exe manually.

There are two things you can check. One is in the device manager where you uninstalled the roms to get windows to reload the generic drivers, but instead you go to IDE ATA/Atapi Controllers and look at the properties (right click each in turn properties) of the channel the drives are on (Primary Secondary) and see if they have reverted to pio mode instead of DMA. It shows in the Advance tab. Its not always easy to tell whats what in there but if you do see pio or if DMA if available is turned off then turn it on. Pio mode should not effect autorun though just slow everything down so the second thing to check is in the registry.

In the registry you would go to
(start > run > and type regedit and hit OK):

HKEY_currentuser/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/policies/explorer/nodrivetypeauto

nodrivetypeauto should be 0x00000095 or 0x00000091

so it Should be either
91 00 00 00 binary or 95 00 00 00 binary
or
0x00000091 (145) reg_dword or 0x00000095 (reg_dword) also works
I've seen both on different machines (91 or 95) and both machines auto ran

the machine I'm typing this on has REG_DWORD 0x00000091 (145) and if I right click it and select modify it shows only the digits 91 and hexidecmal is highlighted.
for auto run to work

b5 00 00 00 [REG_BINARY] would not let the machine autorun when I fixed one of mine.

To be safe before you play you should right click on the entire Policies folder and export it to your C drive or some place you can get to it so if you do something wrong you can double click the saved file and it will revert to where it was.

If you have DMA enabled and your nodrivetype is already 91 or 95 they may have reversed your drives (master and slave) or moved them around. I like to put mine both on the secondary channel and the ribbon is designed so that a master jumpered drive would go on the terminating end of the ribbon and the slave in the middle. Just swapping them might fix the problem if not swap them back. There is another jumper called CS or Cable Select which auto assigns master and slave by their position on the ribbon but I have had issues with it and don't even try it unless nothing else works.

The problem is, if you took it in and paid someone to fix it, your probably not compfortable playing inside so you may end up going back and it might be a good idea since they charged you and messed up.

Lately there is a drive to turn off autorun because USB flash drive viruses can infect your PC automatically with it on. Maybe they turned it off to protect you.

Do you have any yellow marks in your device manager at all?

 

[Guest]

The controllers are set as follows: 1st & 2nd primary devices are set @ DMA if avail, auto detect on both device 0 &1 w/ current transfer mode @ ultra DMA. 1st & 2nd secondary devices are set at the same spec with the exception being the transfer mode being none applicable and auto detect present. I do know the tech did have a flash usb'd in the front while working. He changed my AV program and got rid of a couple of my utilities. He replaced the avast with AVG and dumped some of the ashampoo and tune up utilities stuff along with the STOPzilla. Please keep helping me get through this, it's a crash course and I'm learning something. Thank-you!

 

[Guest]

Appzalien, going through the registry chain as you instructed netted me some values completely unlike your examples, as follows- nodrivetypeauto is set at REG_DWORD w/ data= 0x000000ff(255). If I go back, it'll be with a ball bat (no! just kidding, 'tis the Irish in me!) In retirement, I'm incredibly busy w/ many projects. I am intermediate in terms of this field. My forte is Mechanical Engineering and Consulting in the motorsports environment. Please let me say that I appreciate your help and admire your expertise and knowledge. Ty! Now, how do I change the values to your specification, please?

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi timw128

There is a big difference between Windows not allowing DVD or CD to be read due to registry corruption and faulty hardware
If Windows was re-installed I presume the drive was working.

If you can boot your PC up from your XP CD or a Vista or 7 DVD or a Linux CD/DVD then the optical drive is working.

un-installing software which is designed to write to optical drive can cause registry corruption preventing optical drives reading disks
(some software does not appear to need to write to optical drives but installs drivers even if you have a DVD drive which is read only)

look for 'upper filter driver XP' this is so common that Microsoft has a knowledge base article & fixit page

I found the Vista example, there is a similar one for XP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461/en-au

regards
Mike Barnes

 

[Guest]

thanks, mbarnes86, and no, i do not have the OS cd. i have tried everything suggested in this thread to no avail. why in the heck would i take the machine back to the shop where the tech din't even have the wherewithall to make sure the reg was ok, if indeed as mentioned above, he turned it off to prevent infection. electro-mechanically the drives are fine- hell, they're virtually new and worked fine when i took machine into the shop. my OS was fine and the diagnostics found the hardware problem as i thought. he hooked me into doing a wipe/install. period. as usual in this world of no accountability and denial, he holds firm that it was fine when it left the shop.

 

[damasvara]

Well, re-installing (with HDD reformat) the OS is probably your best bet. Since the technician, according to your description, clearly has his own idea of "good configuration" when he messed up with your OS by exchanging the anti virus and uninstalling softwares. I personally would ask the user and avoid modifying anything without the PC owner's permission. They call it "Personal Computer" not without a reason.

The computer shop is most likely, forgive the prejudice, trying to scam you. Assuming you're computer blind and will comply to anything they tell you. I'd say, that's a crooked way of doing business. Which reminds me of my motorcycle repair for oil leaks. It turns out they replaced more components with twice the charge. And the most annoying thing is, the oil still leaks! I think you got the picture now, the idea of not "completely" repairing to get more money out of customer's ignorance is surely an undignified business concept.

This is the very reason why I study PC building by myself, to avoid being fooled by people like them. I also have an automotive technician as my occupational background, and currently working as an electronics engineer. Being a PC technician as a side job, I wish I can help you first hand. That way you don't have to waste that $100 for a more messed up PC and more for the re-installation job. Why, I only charge $30 bucks for a complete PC building. A straight business means clean money for me. Unfortunately, not everyone thinks the same way I do.

 

[Guest]

ty, damasvara. i am in total agreement with your analogy- square biz=clean money. i prefer to appear ignorant and ask questions in the above mentioned situations. it is the best way of laying a trap for the pretenders. the $100 issue was done behind my back and is not worth my time in small claim litigation and they, the shop, more than likely figured that. what they lost was a customer and what i gained was the desire to 'do-it-myself'. ahh! whatta retirement venture. from the mechanical engineering realm (bsme, dbl masters) we will learn this field in a self initiated crash course. at my age, i feel no need nor desire for classrooms/labs. if i were running a tech shop, my degrees and certs would be posted boldly in plain view as introduction. in my consulting venture in my field, we are what you would say as pre-qualified and need know introduction. it took years to build the client base and new clients appear through the proverbial 'word of mouth'. at present, i am much intrigued with the computer world. in other words, it must come from the heart

 

[Guest]

to mbarnes86- supposedly the latest ms security updates disallows auto run for the drives, as the potential for infection from download to disc exists. so i'm told. the quick fix for me was to create a shortcut on the desktop that a dbl click will cue the drive(s) and media player. i'm not sure if that is the truth refering to the security updates. i'll find out and deal with the shop in question as need be.