DVD Rom and CD-R/W drives quit reading

[StuNad]

I can write to the CD R/W even using XP's native write utility. I see the drive letters in Explorer but cant READ the media on either drive. The Device Manager indicates all is working properly. One workaround is that if I put the media in before I boot up all works well. Using Microsoft's IDE drivers. Checked the IDE cable for loose connections. That should be OK since the workaround is OK. The hard drive is set as the primary master in UDMA mode with an 80 pin cable. The R/W drive is the secondary IDE channel master with the DVD drive as the secondary slave. The CD R/W drive is connected at the end of a 40 pin cable. That all seems conventional. This is a newly built system with all new parts and the cd drives did work properly for at least a month. Nothing changed except for some Windows updates.
Any help is appreciated, STU

ABIT NF7-M
BIOS 19
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 1 Build 2600
Khypermedia ATAPI CD-RW 48X24
MadDog Multimedia IDE DVD-ROM 16X
Kingston Hyper-X (two 256K sticks)

 

[StuNad]

Nah Soaplover, I do not smoke but I could end up drinking. I did revert to the 4.6 ASPI layers via Force ASPI, (dumpaspi.bat, killaspi.bat and instaspi.bat scripts). Did the necessary reboots and chkaspi shows all is happy and properly installed but the situation didn't change. I hate to leave disks in the drives for proper operation but... I'll keep looking for a solution in the interim. Searching around out there shows a myriad of similar situations.

 

[soaplover]

Hi there Stu .
Good to hear you're not smoking . I have to clean my LCD screen every other day as im sitting there surfing & smoking .Cleaning LCD's without hurting the is quite a hassle.
Okay regarding your cd's , what a mess .I'm stunned that it seems impossible to fix this .
Im just throwing out some thoughts:

Disable autorun in windows.
Update aspi layer
IDE init delay (bios)
Changing witch cdr is master / slave
Setting both CD's as CSEL
Test both drives in PIO4(bios) mode with PIO only in dev.mgr
Test with only one cd-drive on the IDE bus.
Downgrade/upgrade BIOS ????
Try other IDE drivers.
msinfo32 ( IRQ conflicts / shared , io addresses,mem addresses)
Use 80pin udma cable for cdroms also.
Having one cdrom at each ide channnel(enables copy on the fly)

hmmm...

Let us know if you're getting there.

Regards Soaplover

 

[StuNad]

Soaplover) Just noticed this as I was going through some of your suggestions. I might have mentioned that I have three SCSI devices on this system, two scanners and one Jazz drive. What I just noticed is that the SCSI Jazz acts just like the ATAPI CD Rom and CD R/W drives. IE, If there is media in the Jazz drive and/or CD Rom and/or CD R/W prior to boot, everything is normal. The key is the SCSI with the removable media acts just like the IDE drives. The SCSI scanners always work. Still have the 4.6 ASPI layer just because I keep hearing it's the most stable. Just passing on the newly discovered wrinkle with the SCSI Jazz. Not sure how ASPI relates to both SCSI and IDE.
STU