CD-RW problem

[mrcurious]

My hard disk died, so I had to get a new one on my NEC/Packard Bell computer, 3-4 years old Also had to get a card to plug in to the mother board in order to drive the hard drive (160 gigs).

My CD drive plays music OK, and I can read CDs I burned myself. But I have some software disks I got from vendors, e.g. with software on them, and which autoload, and I cannot have them automatically start up when I insert them into the drive, nor can I read them with WinExplorer. But the disks can be read, and will autostart, on another computer, so the disks themselves are OK.

I suspect my problem is either cabling, or jumper settings on the CD drive. But I can't figure out what to do to make these disks readable in some way. Can anyonme provide any suggestions, or a link to some resource on the web? Tnx.

 

[DCB_AU]

I don't know if this is what your trying to ask but, - if you want them to autostart/notautostart - Device Manager - properties and click settings (I think), then select/deselect autoinsert.

Or press shift to stop autostarting when inserting the CD. (I thing there is another key also to press to make autostart)

<font color=red><b>DCB</b></font color=red><font color=white><b>_</b></font color=white><font color=blue><b>AU</b></font color=blue>

 

[sobelizard]

I would suspect some foreign debris in your optical drive. Get a non-abrasive cleaning kit and do a thorough cleaning of the drive and any media you put into it. If that doesn't do the trick, you may have a finicky cd drive that cannot read the differences in groove sizes from discs created on other drives. This happens to be a shortcoming on older cd drives. If this is the case, it would be best to replace with an optical drive with current technology.

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[mrcurious]

Those are not bad guesses, but in this case none of those apply.

1. These disks from software vendors all work very well in a drive I have on another machine that's about 4 or 6 years old.

2. Since the CD drive in question reads other disks very well, I have some doubts as to whether there might be dirt or crud in the disk that's preventing the vendor disks from being read.

As I noted, I've moved disks and cables around, and for reasons I could not state explicitly, I have a hunch this problem could be related to that. But I've also experimented moving jumpers and cables around, and so far I have not found any combination that works. I also have a hunch that somehow the failure of these disks to autorun, and to be recognized by Windoze explorer, is related.

 

[sobelizard]

Which 'doze version you running?

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[mrcurious]

I'm using Win98 SE. My computer is a NEC Packard-Bell that's about 5 years old. 92 Megs of memory, AMD k-6 processor. The HD is a 160 gig Western Digital. I had to buy a board of some kind to drive the disk. The motherboard is labelled fr520; if you want info on that it/s available at support.packardbell.com.

I remembered something relevant: just 2 weeks ago the CD drive was recognizing the autorun disk. I know this because I put it in the drive shortly after I had formatted the HD and installed Win98, and it started up the way it should. But I had formatted the HD with the /s option, and this software (GOBACK) objected to that formatting, because it wants to use that portionk of the disk for itself, so that it starts up before anything else. So I erased c:\, re-formatted it, and then re-installed Win98SE. That is when the CD drive started not recognizing any disk that had autorun installed.