Dell PC with XP Home: CD-ROM recognizing/reading issues.

[DirectXFreak]

Greetings,

My year-old Dell Dimention 4700 has performed beautifully up until about a month ago, when the CD-ROM drive simply stopped working. Naturally, I thought it was a hardware issue since the drive is still recognized by windows, yet fails to see any kind of CD (I tried several). My PC, however, has exibited more odd behavior that's beginning to disprove my original conclusion: let me explain.

First off, I own Sony's USB external DVD-RW/CD-RW do-it-all combo drive. My second Dell computer has the exact same setup, and runs both the internal and USB drives perfectly; yet on my ill computer, only the DVD-ROM/DVD-RW, and CD-RW work. The CD-ROM function on my computer fails on both drives!

The second odd thing I've found is that when I boot the computer with a CD in the USB drive, the computer shows the welcome screen, makes the transition to the desktop, but decides instead to show only the desktop background and mouse cursor. When I summon the Task Manager, nothing is running! To my annoyance, my the desktop happily pops up the moment I open the USB CD drive.

Alright, so now I'm thinking there's either a driver issue, a registry issue, or a virus. The last option has pretty much dissipated, since the boot from CD function of the bios yields a frustrating "Unable to boot from disk, press F1 to retry, F2 to enter setup" (this is using my very well kept windows XP disk).

The ultimately frustrating part is that I really just want to wipe the HD and reinstall windows, but I'm afraid my CD drives won't respond!

So what's your diagnosis?

System Specs:
P4 HT 2.8 Ghz
40GB HD
Generic CD-RW drive (there's no company label... bad sign!)
Sony USB DVD/CD external combo drive
nVidia 6800
1.5GB RAM

[flanzig1]

Sounds like the internal cd drive is flacky and may be causing problems with the external. Best thing to try is swap out the internal. New CD-RW drives at the local big box stores can be found in the $30-$40 range.

[DirectXFreak]

Alrighty,

I'll try swapping them out tomorrow, thanks! =) I'll let you know how it turns out.