Unable to Read Resource CD

What might cause a computer to be unable to read the Diagnostic Resource CD that came with it nor another one that Dell sent to try. I recently did a complete reformat eliminating everything on the hard drive and building it up again. I wanted to test my CD burner with the diagnostics disk but it would not load the menu. It starts reading it then when it says loading drivers, this may take a minute it stops. Just black screen with curser. Dell is confused. They said the machine is not using any software to do this and it should be able to read the CD. On my other smaller machine it reads the disk fine but my newer XPS will not load the image. No other issues with the computer at present. Formated drive fine, booted to windows CD fine, laded windows and all other programs fine, internet fine, spyware virus scans run fine nothing found. Seems odd that the only it won't do is read this resource CD. Also, with Dell's help, loaded the 32 bit diagnostics on four floppy disks and tried it with the 3,5 and nothing. Won't read the image off these either. Also tried the CD in my lower CD drive and would start but again not load image. Two different disks, no diagnostics. Dell tech said other XPS system's have read the diagnostics on the resource CD. What could possibley cause this very specific problem?

KM1

PS - Also loaded a dos program on a floppy to see if it would give me an a: prompt and this worked fine.

 

No one has any Ideas????

KM1

 

It is probably the drive itself, you may want to clean the lense,sometimes dust and dirt can get on the lense and cause problems. Some places sell cd rom cleaner disk you can put in and they have little brushes on the disk that clean the lens.If that does not work I would ask dell for a new drive all together.

 

This cannot be the problem. It will read any CD normally, burn CD-R's normally, play music, movies with no trouoble. bring up menus from any CD, just will not boot to the Diagnostic Section of the Resource CD. If I put the Resoursce CD in normally the menu comes up and allows me to load drivers or anything else on it, however, change the boot sequence, restart, and try to boot to the same CD to get at the 32 bit diagnostics on it and nothing. Starts the boot process but then just stops with the cursor blinking and no menu. Cannot figure this out. Is this a hardware problem? My understanding is that when trying to boot to a CD none of the software on the hardrive is bsing used.

KM1