[thechat] CD Drive Ceases To Read CDs

[Chris Marsh]

Ron, Morgan and Stephane

> >>I'm not sure if this is an appropriate forum for this post, 
> so if not 
> >>feel free to mpoint this out to me.
> 
> 'mpoint'? Izzat like 'mport'? Or more like 'mprobable'?  ;-)

It probable should have read "feel free to 'mpoint me" as in 'mpower
me... :)

> >>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.
> 
> IANAHH, ("I Am Not A Hardware Head"), buuuuuuuut ... I thought I saw 
> a tech note yesterday that the new version of Mandrake has 
> the ability 
> to "toast" a CD drive ... something about some hw mfgrs misusing 
> a 'for future use' portion of the spec to rewrite their firmware ... 
> Mandrake issues that command which blanks the internal command set 
> and no new software is loaded in ... thus "toasting" the drive.

Not being a Hardware Head myself, I've found this pretty hard going.
However, it seems that with Windows when a drive is mounted each
registered file system is asked in turn if the drive can be mounted
using that file system. The order that the file systems are called is
dictated by when they were registered, with the most recent being called
first. The RAW file system is apparently registered first and *always*
mounts a volume when asked. If I'm wrong about any of this then I would
welcome corrections, but this makes me wonder if the CDFS registration
has been corrupted. Or something. Or perhaps I'm being over-optimistic
about fixing this via software and the hardware is fubar'd. *Sigh*
sometimes I should learn to cut my losses and recommend the rubbish bin.

Regards

Chris Marsh 

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