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Bad Cd-rw Driver In Windows Xp

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I am requesting advice on how to solve a bad CD-ROM driver in Windows XP. The problem started when my wife asked me to burn a CD for her on my computer. I of course asked her why she couldn’t do it herself and she told me that she didn’t have a CD burner in her computer. I of course knew this wasn’t true because I built the machine myself and used my old burner. After a heated discussion I drug her up to the computer and showed her that she was either plain wrong or out of her mind. This is when I discovered that she indeed didn’t have a burner and I had to apologize which wasn’t very pleasant.1. The CD burner is a Plextor 790A. 2. I can see it located on the 3rd IDE channel in BIOS and everything looks good.3. I can boot from the CD fine so there is no obvious problem with the drive. Right now I am running Spinrite to make sure it is not a bad hard drive sector.4. The drive does not show up in Windows Explorer.5. The Device Manager shows the drive but shows there is a problem with it. The error message is a rather non-informative corrupt driver message. No problems with DMA or IRQ requests.6. I deleted the driver and restarted. When the machine came back up, the driver was reinstalled by Windows. Same message and error.7. Windows detects the drive correctly (name and model). Plextor does not have a standalone driver on their website as Windows XP should already have the driver. (And it does, it just doesn’t work).8. I replaced the IDE cable with no improved results.Any suggestions on what to try next? I am fairly sure that the drive is working properly. The drive has worked in the past but this driver just will not load. Currently I am thinking it is a corrupt hard drive sector which just happens to be where this CD burner driver is located but I am open to suggestions.

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I don’t speak French (?) so I didn’t really understand what was going on. I could have translated it but I already used the atomic option to fix my problem. I reformatted and put Windows 7 on the machine. There were some other weird problems going on besides just the CD so I decided to just nuke it. There were a few programs that refused to uninstall and the boot time was getting really slow. I’m sure there wasn’t any malware on the system so I still think it was some bad hard drive sectors. Even after a checkdisk there were problems. After 4 years, it’s just time to re install Windows.

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Well I'm glad it worked out for you. I often find that my Windows pc's and laptops could use a reformat around once a year. That's probably why I prefer to work with linux lolAs more crap builds up in windows it just begins to drag on and on. I had a dell I acquired from somewhere, and it had been in use for 2 years. The fan inside didn't really make much of a noise to start with, but when I started to push the processor further than it had been used previously (installing several different types of servers and some 3d design and graphic software) after a while the noise of the fan began to get louder and louder. Eventually the sound was literally like a jet engine, it was immense. I thought it may have been a problem with the fans power supply, but no. The processor and hdd were overheating to a shocking degree (cpu was at around 73 degrees, hdd 81 degrees). Anyway after a quick restoration of the operating system from a ghost partition (after backing up all my documents and server config files of course) I've never had a problem with the fan since. It has always run as quiet as a mouse, even when the hdd or cpu is working overtime. Their tempratures remain a standard 30-50 degrees depending on the weather and it runs faster than ever.It just goes to show how much operating systems can directly affect the running of hardware beyond normal parameters.

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I used to love to reformat and I did it at least once a year. But as I’ve gotten older, now it’s just a pain in the butt. I do some programming so I have a highly customized environment that takes at least a few days to get back. Even after that I find that I will be finding “mistakes” for another six months. I will agree that it used to be imperative to reformat Windows often but I have found Windows 7 to be very stable. My last install lasted almost 3 years and the only reason I reformatted was to install a failing boot drive with a SSD. In the Windows 2000 era you could tell a speed decline after around six months. Now I can’t really feel a difference even after a year.

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