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- 14 Oct 2007
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Ok so my friend's PC which I made for her (so I naturally feel feel responsible when things go wrong with it) is having a problem with optical media. I just want to say before I go on that I was considering putting this in the Optical Storage & Writing section but because of the circumstances it could be any number of things, so I thought it might as well go in here.
Anyway basically it's got a bog standard circa £20 dvd and cd reader/writer/re-writer in it but for some reason it won't read CDs, only DVDs. Now I built this comp about 3 months ago now but only now has it become apparent that it doesn't agree with CDs. Now as far as I'm aware, it's not because it's not compatible with the type of writable cd she wants it to read (you know that + and - stuff), because it won't read normal retail CDs either. And just to clarify yes it is meant to be compatible with CDs as well as DVDs.
Oh and here are the rough specs, off the top of my head:
Intel E2200 @ Stock (2.2Ghz iirc) (wished I'd overclocked that, now I think about it
)
A Gigabyte board using the P31 chipset, a DS3L actually
2Gb 800Mhz RAM, the OCZ Platinum Stuff
Optiarc CD/DVD Combo Drive, Model No. AD 7200-S I think
WD Hard Drive, 250Gb or around that size
All running on Windows Vista Ultimate, Service Pack 1
Now normally I'd put it down to hardware failure and just put in a new optical drive, but looking on some other forums which turn up when I search google, it would appear other peopel are having similar problems. The other wierd thing is, when I put in a CD-R (or other writable CD that I've put stuff on), it finds the CD and like acknowledges that there's one in the drive, but when I go to find what's on it, it's empty.
At first I thought this was a problem on my end when I was actually writing to the CD but like I said she said she's had no luck with the CDs she has, and when you actually look at the properties of the CDs and it comes up with that funky pie chart thing, it actually shows that there's a portion of the disk being taken up with used space.
It's as though it knows there's stuff on there but it's just not showing it. So I'm thinking it's probably software related, I'm just not sure how to get around it. Some of the solutions given in other forums involved going into regedit and changing some of the parameters to do with the filters. I tried that as well (which I wouldn't usually do, because whenever I get told to go into regedit I become very cautious and paranoid lol) but with no luck, even after restarting the comp.
Like I said, I put it down to software, more specifically the operating system. I never really was a fan of Vista ultimate because I'd heard of some bad things people were saying about it a few months after it was released in terms of stability, but I would have thought SP1 would have fixed that by now. Saying that though, I also heard many more bad things about SP1, but I didn't really want to uninstall that because I was afraid I might do more damage doing that.
If any of you guys have any questions or want any more info then just let me know. I might not be able to get all of it straight away because her house isn't massively close to mine. Oh and I should just say I only physically built the PC for her, I left it to one of her relatives to install the OS on it because apparently he could get that sorted easily. When I was on it last trying to fix this problem, I saw that it wasn't activated, and apparently she'd been told by the person that'd installed the OS that she shouldn't try to activate it if it ever told her to. So I don't think it's quite legit, though I don't think this problem's related to that.
Oh and sorry about the length. It try to give as much info as possible because I've seen too many other threads on here where OP doesn't quite get across their situation and/or the question they're trying to ask.
Thanks guys!
Anyway basically it's got a bog standard circa £20 dvd and cd reader/writer/re-writer in it but for some reason it won't read CDs, only DVDs. Now I built this comp about 3 months ago now but only now has it become apparent that it doesn't agree with CDs. Now as far as I'm aware, it's not because it's not compatible with the type of writable cd she wants it to read (you know that + and - stuff), because it won't read normal retail CDs either. And just to clarify yes it is meant to be compatible with CDs as well as DVDs.
Oh and here are the rough specs, off the top of my head:
Intel E2200 @ Stock (2.2Ghz iirc) (wished I'd overclocked that, now I think about it
)A Gigabyte board using the P31 chipset, a DS3L actually
2Gb 800Mhz RAM, the OCZ Platinum Stuff
Optiarc CD/DVD Combo Drive, Model No. AD 7200-S I think
WD Hard Drive, 250Gb or around that size
All running on Windows Vista Ultimate, Service Pack 1
Now normally I'd put it down to hardware failure and just put in a new optical drive, but looking on some other forums which turn up when I search google, it would appear other peopel are having similar problems. The other wierd thing is, when I put in a CD-R (or other writable CD that I've put stuff on), it finds the CD and like acknowledges that there's one in the drive, but when I go to find what's on it, it's empty.
At first I thought this was a problem on my end when I was actually writing to the CD but like I said she said she's had no luck with the CDs she has, and when you actually look at the properties of the CDs and it comes up with that funky pie chart thing, it actually shows that there's a portion of the disk being taken up with used space.
It's as though it knows there's stuff on there but it's just not showing it. So I'm thinking it's probably software related, I'm just not sure how to get around it. Some of the solutions given in other forums involved going into regedit and changing some of the parameters to do with the filters. I tried that as well (which I wouldn't usually do, because whenever I get told to go into regedit I become very cautious and paranoid lol) but with no luck, even after restarting the comp.
Like I said, I put it down to software, more specifically the operating system. I never really was a fan of Vista ultimate because I'd heard of some bad things people were saying about it a few months after it was released in terms of stability, but I would have thought SP1 would have fixed that by now. Saying that though, I also heard many more bad things about SP1, but I didn't really want to uninstall that because I was afraid I might do more damage doing that.
If any of you guys have any questions or want any more info then just let me know. I might not be able to get all of it straight away because her house isn't massively close to mine. Oh and I should just say I only physically built the PC for her, I left it to one of her relatives to install the OS on it because apparently he could get that sorted easily. When I was on it last trying to fix this problem, I saw that it wasn't activated, and apparently she'd been told by the person that'd installed the OS that she shouldn't try to activate it if it ever told her to. So I don't think it's quite legit, though I don't think this problem's related to that.
Oh and sorry about the length. It try to give as much info as possible because I've seen too many other threads on here where OP doesn't quite get across their situation and/or the question they're trying to ask.
Thanks guys!
