[thechat] CD Drive Ceases To Read CDs

[DESCHAMPS Stéphane DSI/SICOR]

> A friend of mine has a a PC with an internal CD burner. He 
> told me that
> some time ago it stopped reading *some* CDs, but not all; seemingly
> randomly. Now, it will not read any CDs at all. I took a look at it
> yesterday, and this proves to be the case. I tried home-burnt CDs, and
> original MS CDs, all with the same effect. It seems to accept 
> that there
> is a CD in the drive and it does not complain that the CD needs
> formatting (or indeed any message at all), but in the 
> Properties window
> it informs me that there is 0 data, and the drive has a size of 0. It
> also claims that the FS is RAW. Has anyone else come across anything
> similar? Any advice much appreciated...

Hey Chris, I can only sympathise with that since the same thing has been happening to one of my boxes. First randomly it refused to see there was a CD inserted, and now it never sees them anymore.

We compared our experience with a friend of mine who had the same problem and wondered whether it had something to do with installing the UDF reader that EasyCD Creator puts on CD-RWs to make them readable on other CD drives.

The five-year-old machine that has stopped reading CDs correctly has no burner inside anymore, yet it still refuses to understand the word "ceedee". It acts as if no CD was inserted. Additionnally, it does not understand such words as "fast" or "reliable", not to mention "silent", but that's another story entirely.

Strangely when I insert audio CDs, and although Windows (win98) tells me there's no CD, I can click on the front buttons of the CD player and guess what? They play. Weird, uh?

For quite a few months I've been considering dropping entirely this computer job and go breed sheep somewhere in mountains where DSL means nothing... ;-)