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)

 

[soaplover]

Could be that aspi layers are not correctly installed.

The symptoms of ASPI related problems
Problems that may occur if there is no proper ASPI setup:

-The CD/DVD devices are not detected by the software
-The CD/DVD devices don’t operate correctly with some program
In several occasions people have reported XP BSODing when running CDr applications or any ASPI reliant application. This is usually due to mixed aspi versions on your system. To overcome this, first use the aspichk.exe utility and check the aspi versions. If they do not match, you will need to delete the files and re-install aspi. It is normal under XP that aspichk reports a red box indicating 2 missing files and that aspi is not properly installed. T

Download the latest from here (xp-comtatible)
Note ! for XP it should be ver.ASPI XP v4.71.2 .

Get it here.

http://www.clonead.co.uk/

//Soaplover

 

[StuNad]

I'm getting this under "aspichk.exe":

-

http://www.adeptec.com-

WINDOWS XP
Component Version Size
ASPI32.SYS 4.71.2 16877 bytes
WDWPOST.EXE 4.6 (1021)4672 bytes
WINASPI.DLL 4.6 (1021)5600 bytes
WINASPI32.DLL 4.71.2 45056 bytes

The versions appear to match... not sure of the 4.6's. I do have an Adaptec 2740 host adapter with 2 SCSI scanners and a Jazz drive on the chain which work normally. Still not sure if the Adaptec card didn't force an incorrect ASPI layer from the files. What do you think? Should I delete these and go for download you suggested?

 

[soaplover]

The two in the middle is not neccesary for xp .
Have you upgraded from W2K ?
What mode are they in ( PIO or DMA , MULTIWORD ) ?
Try rename them to wdwpost.ex_ and winaspi.dl_

//Soaplover

 

[StuNad]

The XP-Pro was a fresh install. The 2 drives are in DMA mode
Noticed another wrinkle when I did a search to locate the two files before I renamed them as you suggested. There was already a wowpost.ex_ besides the wowpost.exe. This was in the c:\adaptec\aspi folder. The executable is a windows file in the c:\windows folder. Same deal with the winaspi.dll. Notably the underscored file extensions were dated when I installed the system and later replaced with the Windows files. The ABIT motherboard is an NFORCE2. One change I did make which I should of mentioned was originally there were NVIDIA IDE drivers. I've been hearing that they were a source of IDE issues and ABIT recommends using Microsoft's. I changed them thinking they may of caused the CD read problems. Don't know if that messed with the ASPI layers and why did Windows install them? I feel we're close to a solution. Would you still recommend renaming those 2 files and installing the download in light of the above? Thanks again..

 

[soaplover]

I have made a test myself . As i also have Abit NF7-s V 2.0
I installed the adaptec 4.71 ones .
Opened CMD and ran "install.bat xp32" .
My Nero info tool now say that system aspi is corrupt .
Don't know if thats because of the winaspi and wowpost
(as they'r not needed) .
I have ran nerospeed on both my drives and it looks okay .
CDRW is ASUS 2410 .
DVDrom is LiteOn LTD-122 .
Tested with data disk of 58.minutes ,though i reacted
that burst rate was only 1MB/S .

I use bios vers. 17 and have noticed somting strange
when bios post screen rolls my CDRW drive reports PIO4
mode . But in device manager it's DMA enabled(Multi-Word DMA2) .Guess that windows takes over the bios .

I also made a test by unistalling the second IDE channel
and rebooted to se if there was any change,but nothing changed .
Have you tried that ?

//Soaplover

 

[soaplover]

My opinion on the NVIDIA ide driver is stay away from it.
I tested it and during each shutdown i got
corrupted files on my western caviar SP edition .
So i went back to using the drivers from the Abit CD .
Works like a charm after that .


...

 

[StuNad]

One last look...hopefully.
As I'm looking deeper into this I'm seeing what I may have done wrong initially. After installing XP-Pro I realized I needed ASPI layers for my SCSI devices to work. Looking at the files returned from aspichk.exe I may have installed ASPI for Win 2000. Looking at the Adaptec release notes for 4.71.2, it says.. For Win XP 32-bit:
ASPIXP.SYS will be copied to %windir%\system32\drivers\ASPI32.SYS
WNASPIXP.DLL will be copied to %windir%\system32\WNASPI32.DLL

It looks like ASPIXP.SYS and WNASPIXP.DLL are needed instead of the ASPI32.SYS and WNASPI.DLL that I installed. NOW, can I just rename these 2 and reinstall properly or are there registry issues? Again, the SCSI devices do work BUT I do have yellow question marks in the DEVICE Manager for the SCSI devices. Hopefully this would resolve the CD read issues stated originally. What do you think? I do appreciate your inputs.

 

[soaplover]

Have you seen this :

If you have experienced a failure to allocate a buffer, you may need to do one or all of the following:
1. Increase the non-paged pool size on your PC (allocate more RAM to non-paged pool),
2. Physically add mo re RAM to your PC.
3. Decrease the buffer size requested.
The first thing to do is to increase the non-paged pool size.
1) How to increase the non-paged pool size?
i. Run regedt32.exe ( click Start ØRun and type regedt32 ),
ii. Edit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ Ã
SessionManager\MemoryManagement\NonPagedPoolSize
This parameter is a REG_DWORD (32 bits).
November 6, 2001 30 Adaptec
NOTE: If it is set to 0x00, the default minimum portion of RAM is allocated to non-paged pool.
iii. Set this parameter to 0xffffffff (the maximum portion of RAM is allocated to non-paged pool.) Reboot
the PC and try the application again.
NOTE: If GetASPI32Buffer still fails; you may not have enough physical RAM in the PC, and you
may need to physically install additional RAM.
If GetASPI32Buffer now works, then gradually decrease the non-paged pool size (by specifying the amount of
RAM allocated to non-paged pool) to optimize.
Tips
Set the NonPagedPoolSize to 0x00100000 for 1 MegaByte; 0x00200000 for 2 MegaBytes; etc.
See the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) article Q126402 (

http://www.microsoft.com)

for more information
regarding setting the non-paged pool size.

....

 

[soaplover]

There should not be any registry issues.
Registry only points to the location of aspi32.sys
and has no info about wnaspi32.dll.
so renaming the xp aspi files and putting them in the windows\system32 and windows\system32\drivers folder should be enough.

//Soaplover

 

[soaplover]

ohoi STU !!!!!!

How are your computer doing ?
Any improvments ?

//Soaplover

 

[StuNad]

I went through everything suggested and ended up at square one. Still not reading the CD drives unless the media is installed before booting up. I am realizing that the ASPI situation is a mess on XP and I'm not alone. Just came across this and will sort through it.

http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/aspi.htm

I'll post the findings if any... thanks again, STU

 

[soaplover]

Do you have nero installed .
Curious to what nero speed check will report on your system (with a cd inserted after boot ).

//Soaplover

 

[bcastner]

StuNad:

I used to mess around with this until I found:
Force ASPI:

http://aspi.radified.com/

 

[soaplover]

so.. going back to ver. 4.60 via forceaspi would do the trick .
hmmm sounds interesting , perhaps i want to make a note of this ??

//Soaplover

 

[StuNad]

I don't have NERO installed...use NTI but I did TRY and install Nero CD Speed v2.02 to check the CD speed (Soaplover). It encountered a problem installing... Cd drives were operating (media inserted before boot) when I tried to run the APP. I did come across that 'Radified site' ... Never did have 4.6 installed. Bcastner, "What issues did 4.6 resolve for you"?

 

[bcastner]

Everything worked.

It becomes decidedly tedious to muck about with ASPI, IMAPI and other layers.

For someone in your situation, if I sat at your machine I would:

. Remove Nero and in particular any Roxio software;
. reboot
. Manually set a restore point in System Restore
. ForceAspi
. reboot
. Manually set a new restore point in System Restore
. Re-install Nero and test.
. Manually set a restore point.
. reboot

Now you can install any other burners you may want. It would be my best advice not to install any Roxio products. It is sad, Roxio should have "owned" this market. But when I see optical drive issues the first thing I remove is any Roxio product.

I know this is unecessary as a caution in a professional Forum such as this, but trying to use at least two commercially available CD burning programs (that I have seen) from a download from Kazaa, eMule, mIRC or whatever can lead to it completely mucking up your ASPI and IMAPI registry entries as a copy protection measure. These issues are more difficult to sort, but the advice I began this note with should suffice.

 

[soaplover]

New tip:
One of your cdroms maybe need a longer time to initiate with no cd in it when you restart/startup .
Set "Delay IDE Initial" in bios to 4.secons or more .
It's under "Advanced BIOS Features Menu" .
I have done this on my NF7-S , my DVDrom is old and a bit slow to initialize and prepare for action.

The bios value is default "0" and max. is 15.sec.

//soaplover

 

[StuNad]

I felt confident that the 4 sec delay would work because I see a delay there with a disk inserted before boot (when all works). Without a disk inserted the IDE acquisition post flies right by. But the added delay didn't work. I'm almost ruling out the ASPI but not yet. I removed the ASPI files and the ATAPTI CD's still weren't recognized. I notice that the CD R/W disk reads but with zero bytes used, like a blank disc. The DVD drive says," Please insert a disk in Drive". Something changed and NO new software was added since it last worked. Some file could have gotten corrupted. The only real additions to the system since normal operation we're the usual barrage of Windows updates and patches. No Nero or Roxio software was ever installed, just NTI's CD-maker Platinum. I may roll back eventually. I'll keep plugging as time permits. All suggestions are appreciated...Thanks

 

[soaplover]

You aren't smoking sigars and blowing in your computer are you ?? foggy lens .



Just a thought.