CD-ROM drive not responding . ( this is for dweller :) )

[BelleCarolinaPeridot]

( I am posting this for dweller , he does not have a star so he is not able to post in any of the DU Groups . So if any computer savvy DUer could help him that would be very nice of you :) )


a few weeks ago, i brought home a cd with a pic on it that my dad wanted reduced (10mb or something) to an emailable size. When i popped it in one of my drives, then the other both drives acted like there was NOT a cd in the drive. I noticed when we were burning the cd on his comp. that some message came up about needing a certain reader to read the cd, but i figured ..not a problem.

So, i ended up opening the box, checking all cables, and rebooting. It was fine after that for a few days. Whenever i tried to read a cd, or burn one, no problems. Then the a: drive (floppy) started the same thing. I uninstalled the device (control panel) and rebooted, and it re-installed and worked again. Then recently, all 3 drives, floppy and both cd, started doing the same thing again. I uninstalled, rebooted, they reinstalled and were fine again.

Today i went to hook up my digital camera...sigh. Same problem with that now. And all 3 above drives saying the same thing, but now uninstalling and rebooting is not working.

Win2000 system. I have AVG virus check and it's updated and not seeing anything. I am currently dl'ing current Norton av updates to check again (altho AVG usually finds what Norton does not).

The only other behavior i'm noticing is on reboot, winlogon.exe seems to run forever (several minutes as opposed to seconds) which makes me think something ugly is on my beater. Sigh.

Has anyone ever had this problem, or know what else to do about it? It's strange that drives a: d: and e: would just quit recognizing and now the digital camera (usb g: drive) too. The camera was working fine 2 weeks ago when last used and pics were uploaded.

many thanks for any advice.

dp

[RoyGBiv]

1. Random thoughts ...

This sure enough is a head-scratcher.

How old is your main hard drive, what type (ATA or SATA or something else), brand, how big, etc.?

My first thought (guess) after reading this is the potential of an imminent hard drive failure, causing a corruption of drivers, which would explain why you keep having to reinstall the devices. Drop to a DOS prompt (START > Accessories > Command (or MS DOS) Prompt) and type in CHKDSK /F and see what happens. If there are physical defects on the drive, this will find them and attempt to fix the corrupted data. If that turns up nothing, it's probably something else.

If you know how to get into your BIOS settings (this is usually done by pressing DEL or F8 immediately after a reboot, before Windows starts to load) check there to see if the BIOS is recognizing that the drives exist. I suspect this is not the problem, but it never hurts to check these low-level issues just to narrow the possibilities. If the BIOS doesn't report, for example, your CD-ROM being there, you have a different set of issues that could be anything from a bad cable to a fried BIOS.

I've experienced problems similar to this and the source of the issue in many cases turned out to be my boot drive, not necessarily failure, but bad sectors or something. However, weird things can cause these kinds of issues.

[RoyGBiv]

2. Update from Dweller

I'm still scratching my head, but he found something while running chkdsk that is an oddity.

From his message to me:

Upon running chkdsk, he got the following message:

"cannot lock current drive b/c vol is in use by another process
run on next boot? "

[banjosareunderrated]

3. is it possible the sam database was corrupted?

and that could explain the long logon period? perhaps something other than malware. don't know how that would affect drivers loading though....