CD drive detected only when media is present

[aaronvvright]

My Sony CD-RW drive will only be detected by XP if there's a CD in it when I boot the PC. Otherwise it's not there and when I put in a CD like the winXP, nothing happens because I don't have a CD-ROM drive (doesn't appear in Explorer)

Any thoughts?

 

[fluteplr]

Are you running any cd related software that may be loading something at boot time?

 

[aaronvvright]

Nope.

http://www.Aaron-Wright.com

 

[Niall22]

Are you running the CD-RW drive in DMA mode? Try changing the DMA settings to enabled or disabled. Does your BIOS detect the drive when you boot up? (Look at POST screen).
You could have a flakey drive or bad IDE cable. You could also try moving the drive to another IDE channel or change it from master to slave or vice versa.

Niall

 

[aaronvvright]

How would I go about toggling DMA? Where are these settings?

And I'm pretty sure my CD drive is fine, as it worked fine in Win2k. Also, it is detected in the BIOS and I have it set as my second boot device (after my non-existant floppy drive).

If the DMA thing doesn't work, I'll look into switching the master and slave etc.

http://www.Aaron-Wright.com

 

[Niall22]

Go into Device Manager by right-clicking "My Computer" icon, click "Hardware" tab and then click the "Device Manager" button. Expand "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" and double-click the controller that your CD-RW is installed on. Click the "Advanced Settings" tab and you can adjust the DMA settings there.

You can also check for any device conflicts or errors in Device Manager. Look for yellow question marks.

Niall