My Cd Drive Has A Mind Of Its Own

my 52x "lite" cd drive that i had installed into my computer about two years ago seems to pick and choose when it wants to open for some reason. sometimes its pops open, sometimes it doesnt when i push the botton. my os is xp home edition sp 2. can anyone give me some suggestions please? thank you very much, allen.

 

Sounds like a firmware issue have you tried the vendor site and checked for updated firmware or if they have a solution to the problem.

 

Hi alf3367
If the CD isn't actually spinning, then the door should pop open almost immediately. This is only anecdotal, but a friend of mine has had this same problem twice. Yes, twice in a 3 year span. He asked me about it, and while over at his place, I noticed that his ashtray ( he smokes ) was to the right of his tower. The "offwhite" tower had a yellow stain near the ashtray. You guessed it. The tar had worked it's way into the button on the CD and was preventing it from working. After a trip to R*dio Sh*ck to obtain a spray can of electronics cleaner, we removed the drive, placed it on some newspapers and sprayed around the button. A lot of yellow crap came out. Next, I removed the bezel, so I had access to the button and then, sprayed the crap out of it. Later, that week, he informed me that all his CD problems were over and that he'd also cleaned his VCR, Stereo and Home Theatre and got similar satisfactory results.

 

Thanks Insomniac. You caught my bad grammer. I needed to continue with "after you press the button". I appreciate the correction. Thanks again.

 

first off thanks for the replys. second, this has been doing this for a couple of weeks. the drive seems to pick and choose when it wants to pop open. a restart will then let it pop open. when it works it works great its just very annoying. thanks

 

Another thought .... I once had 2 hard drives and a CD-rom in my win98 machine. It was configured as C: drive IDE1 Master and D: drive IDE2 Master and the CD was E: drive on IDE2 Slave. D: drive was used as a bulk drive and for file backup but was rarely used otherwise. I had the "new fangled" Energy Star Mobo which enabled windows to selectively shut down unused devices after a time interval. When my D: drive would go to sleep it would disable the CD Rom drive. I could press on that button 'til the cows came home and nothing. However, if I opened Explorer and clicked on the D: drive icon, both my D: drive and the CD rom would come to life. As you can see, I'm clinging to anything that will save you $60.00, or whatever these CDRW/DVD's cost these days.

 

thank u. next time this hppens i will pay close attention to what exactly happens. and i will try to go through my computer and use d: and so on. thanks

 

Do you have any packet writing software running, like InCD or DirectCD etc? They've been known to cause this.

There is a virus (harmless but annoying) that can also cause this. (visit the Malware forum)

Or it could be the drive itself, it's very hard to say.