cd rom opening/closing constantly

stormchaser · 12 Apr 2006 at 01:09

hi
a friend of mine has emailed with a strange problem...............after about 10 minutes of his pc booting up , his cd rom goes nuts and opens and closes constantly , it only recently happened and his pc is a packard bell running xp .

any ideas why this is happening or how to solve it?

many thanks

cheers

Fantom · 12 Apr 2006 at 01:12

I heard about a virus that does that during the night to wear out the drive without the user knowing

so a virus scan would be a good idea

Werewolf · 12 Apr 2006 at 01:28

it's something one of the old trojens would let you do (IIRC you can also do it with most of the desktop control tools).

Howver if he comes up clean with an AV scan, it could be simple hardware failure (dodgy switch on the drive).

syke · 12 Apr 2006 at 01:42

theres a thing called funny.exe that does that?

locutus12 · 12 Apr 2006 at 02:17

might i suggest a preist ??? :confused:

Mercutio · 12 Apr 2006 at 11:42

locutus12 said:
might i suggest a preist ???

Or a priest?

BONES__69 · 12 Apr 2006 at 17:02

Simple way too see if it's a virus is to remove the IDE cable. Then if it carries on opening/closing then you know it's most likely a hardware issue with the drive itself. If it stops opening/closing then you know it's likely a virus or software issue as the open/close signal is being sent down the IDE cable.

Nikolic · 12 Apr 2006 at 17:19

I remember a prank that has the ability to do this.

Check in your running processes for anything suspicious. The prank I'm thinking about went by the name "cd.exe" iirc.