Anyone else having Optical Drive issues under Windows XP?

[awayman]

We have about 50 PC's running windows XP in our office. A while back (about the time Internet Explorer 7 came out, but I don't know if that's actually related or not), we started having issues with the optical drives on multiple machines.

The symptoms are that when someone puts in a disc, Windows thinks about it for a bit, then shows a disc has been inserted in the drive that is 0 bytes total size. Trying to open the disc prompts the user to "insert a disc." One reboot immediately corrects the issue, until the next time it happens.

I strongly feel that this isn't hardware related, because it's happening on CD-rom drives, DVD drives, burners, etc, and it's also happening on multiple brands and ages of computers, from nearly new to 5 years old or more. Some of the PC's have the original drives, some are replacements.

As I mentioned, this seemed to start around the time we rolled out IE7, but I think this may have happened a time or two on a PC that is still on IE6. I think there has to be a common thread in our software environment that's causing this, but it occurs so randomly that I'm having a hard time isolating it.

Thanks in advance,
Aaron

 

[gbaughma]

Sounds like a service pack messed you up. Take one machine that it is doing it with, and first make sure that you've got all the recent service packs, and see if that solves the problem (it may have been an issue with a service pack that was fixed in a later one).



Just my 2¢
"Life gets mighty precious when there's less of it to waste." -Bonnie Raitt "Nick of Time"
--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[awayman]

Thanks for the tip. This started well after we rolled out Service Pack 2, but since you mentioned it, I've seen re-installation of an old service pack fix weird issues like this in the past. We'll try it on a couple of boxes and see how it goes.

If you're referring to the multitude of hotfixes for windows XP, I think I'd rather deal with the occasional reboot than trying to comb through the 40 or 50 (or more?) hotfixes that Microsoft has released to try to find the problem.

There's also the possibility that some non-microsoft software (i.e., Quicktime or Acrobat Reader) that everyone is running is causing some weird conflict, but I haven't looked too deeply at that. We're not running anything too crazy or unusual on our machines.

Has nobody else seen this? I would find it very strange that something is affecting a large number of our machines, starting about the same time, and nobody else is having similar issues. Anything is possible with IT problems, though....

 

[dglienna]

Check for iTunes on the system.

-David
2006 & 2007 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)
2006 Dell Certified System Professional (CSP)

 

[felixc]

To add to what Dglienna has suggested, many apps add their own media detection programs atop of the standard OS one. Could they be the ones in fault? My ATI media center does this, my soundblaster software does it too, most CD-writer apps do it, and probably just every application that has to get an access to the CD drive. Music and video players. Those that want to take precedence over Media player. Even the anti-virus programs will check and control every disc change. Can they all coexist peacefully atop of each other? Is there any way to see how many programs are trapping the call before it finally gets to the standard OS. I know of a Nero app that randomly crashes a whole XP system that I assembled recently.

 

[ceh4702]

I very seldom ever use an optical disk at my office. I wonder if when you go to put the disk in the device has not been used for so long you might get some dirt or dust buildup. We tend to prefer to load stuff off of an image on the network.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[awayman]

I don't think it's a dust buildup issue, mainly because a reboot always fixes it. I'm inclined to blame a media player program, as felixc suggested. Our antivirus is also a likely suspect. I'll post here if I get time to figure out what it is (it's not a top priority; similar to ceh4702's comments, we don't use optical drives all that often).