Techie PC Problems

[kenpem]

Hiya folks

Firstly, my main desktop PC. The optical drives keep disappearing. Windoze bitches that I'm not supposed to just remove them, and that's it - they gone until the next reboot, after which they come back for maybe an hour.... and then die again. Sound familiar, anyone? Windoze 2000 Pro. They're both IDE drives, Master & Slave on the same IDE port. Been working fine for ages, just suddenly started farting around yesterday. Panda AV Platinum is running & up to date, as is Spybot SD.

[gazlannathai]

Are they operating under the "new" style removable media resource allocation drivers?

e.g. ......

My digicam is USB and classed as a removable drive - when connected it pops up as drive "I" but when disconnected it vanishes off the drive table.

Perhaps the system recognising your drives being present relies on a media disc being in them? It's worth testing.

[kenpem]

Both drives have disks in. Oh yeah and sometimes - but not always - after the drives have vanished, I can't even eject the trays.

[Apollo2003]

Ken, do you get an icon down by the clock when you have plugged in the device ? Not used Windows 2000 much but did in the states, you have to disconnect it manually before unplugging the device

[kenpem]

no, these are IDE drives.

[gazlannathai]

Thinking about it, I used to get the same issue off my IDE CD-RW (the HDD & CDD were on IDE-1, the CD-RW on IDE-2) I tried everything and ended up swapping the mainboard which cured it for a while, then it's started doing it on this board as well.

My initial reaction was the old board had a dodgy IDE-2 channel, but now I'm thinking it may be the on-drive drive controller at fault (it also intermittently refuses to auto-run when I put in a CD)

My issue is a single drive and due to be swapped out anyway (I want a CD-DVD- RW combo drive ...... please Dad can I? huh? huh? can I? Awww go on Daaadddd ?)

Ahem, sorry, as I was saying - try splitting the two optical drives so that one on each IDE channel and see if one stays up but not the other, and if the drive moved to IDE-2 then disappears - it'll tell you if it's the channel or a master/slave style conflict or if it's the drives themselves.

Gaz

[pasiphae]

Thinking about it, I used to get the same issue off my IDE CD-RW (the HDD & CDD were on IDE-1, the CD-RW on IDE-2) I tried everything and ended up swapping the mainboard which cured it for a while, then it's started doing it on this board as well.

My initial reaction was the old board had a dodgy IDE-2 channel, but now I'm thinking it may be the on-drive drive controller at fault (it also intermittently refuses to auto-run when I put in a CD)

My issue is a single drive and due to be swapped out anyway (I want a CD-DVD- RW combo drive ...... please Dad can I? huh? huh? can I? Awww go on Daaadddd ?)

Ahem, sorry, as I was saying - try splitting the two optical drives so that one on each IDE channel and see if one stays up but not the other, and if the drive moved to IDE-2 then disappears - it'll tell you if it's the channel or a master/slave style conflict or if it's the drives themselves.

Gaz

Ken

Have a nose in the bios for UltraDMA type settings - what are they?