Virus or CD drive?? or XP....

[di_markeo10]

Hi, again apologies in advance for any poor descriptions, i am new to this!

a friends cd drive is only partially reading disks, with a message appearing saying the drive could not read all the data. The cd drive does read some data from the disk but not all. For example it recognises audio cds but cannot play the music.

His computer has been giving alot of problems, and he has up untill now not had a virus checker installed. We could not install an anti-virus program i had due to the drive not reading the cd properly, but a downloaded program suggested the presence of some trojan viruses. Could these have infected the cd drive? He wants to format the computer but without being sure the cd drive will read his XP disc feels it is a bit risky. It may be just that the cd drive is faulty and needs replaced. Would try re-installing XP but again, the drive does not read the disk so it is not possible.

Any ideas? Perhaps there is nothing to loose in attempting a format of the computer? Or any other suggestions??

thanks in advance

[ktkendall]

Just boot from the XP cdrom and you should get a good idea if it's a hardware problem with the drive itself if it tries but can not boot from the XP CD, and if it does boot from it fine with no problem then you are probably looking at what you suspect with the viruses. You can then cancel the setup program that will load when you boot from the XP cd and reboot back into windows with no harm done and work out those virus problems..

[di_markeo10]

thanks for the suggestion, will give it a go and see.

cheers!