I have a Sony CRX216E CD RW. It suddenly stopped recognizing discs of any kind. If I put an audio cd or a cd-rom in the drive it just continues trying to read it and freezes or it will say "insert cd into drive" or something like that. I put a laser lens cleaner disc in and it will read it, open the program, perform the cleaning process, then play a test audio just fine but it will not recognize any other disc whatsoever. I don't recall doing anything different or new. It just stopped working suddenly. Anyone have any ideas?

Paula

Knoppix 5.1.1 (http://iso.linuxquestions.org/knoppix/knoppix-5.1.1/)

(a) Do you have more that one optical drive?
(b) If not could you borrow and add a second optical drive? A reader?

(c) If you can, then use the optical reader to load a distro [Knoppix 5.1.1] of Linux off a FREE bootable CD.

(d) Then use the optical disk burning program [kd3 ?] included with the OS [Knoppix 5.1.1] to manipulate an optical disk.
Erase a re-writeable disk for example using the burner.
It's nice to have something like this as a backup method for when/if Windows misbehaves.

(e) If the above works you will know that there's nothing wrong with your PC's hardware; there's something wrong with the Windows provision for handling optical disks.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't have another optical drive. The drive worked for a long time before it stopped.

Paula

1. Is the CD-RW drive seen by the BIOS and displayed as detected and correctly identified [on screen during Startup and/or] in the BIOS Setup.

2. Is the CD-RW drive displayed in Device Manager?
Display devices "By Connection" and expand the tree by hitting Numlock *, then Numlock again.
See screenshot below of my own DVD-RW drive showing in Device Manager.

3. Which version of Windows are you running?

4. Do you have a FDD?

1. Yes, it is seen in the BIOS and correctly identified.

2. It is displayed in the device manager.

3. I have XP Professional.

4. I do have a FDD.

Make a FREE copy of Bob Cerelli's Win98SE Boot Floppy (http://www.onecomputerguy.com/install/floppies.htm#boot_floppy).
Boot that, enable/load the CD-drive drivers included, and use it to see if you can browse the contents of a [Windows?] CD in the optical drive using DOS commands.

I tried making the Win98 boot disk and it gave me an A:\ prompt but I guess I don't know what to do from there. I tried to access D: but either it didn't work or I don't know how.

Something I have found since I last posted here is that my cdrw is listed in the device manager but it is listed under "unknown." There is no cd drive category in my device manager. I have a cleaner disc that I inserted into the drive and it will start the program on it and run it then play the test music at the end just fine. The cleaner disc is a dos program. My Dell Windows XP disc will now start in the cdrw when in Windows but other discs won't. The computer usually won't boot from it but twice it did go on into the Windows disc but both times I got error messages that something couldn't load.

1. When the boot floppy was loading DOS it should have asked permission to load the driver for the optical drive, did it?
You should give the OK to that.

2. Once at the A:\> command prompt you need to type appropriate commands and hit "Enter" on the keyboard.
I'm no expert on DOS, but here's the first command you might use [if memory serves]:

A:\>dir x: /p

The Bob Cerelli floppy always gives the letter x to the 1st optical drive detected, so that simplifies which letter to type.
If you read the text on screen, you will see that x is the drive letter being used/specified IF you load the driver.

EXPLANATION
The dir command tells DOS to display all the directories found on the drive specified [= x:].
The /p switch tells DOS to display the list one page at a time. Hit the "Page Down" key on the keyboard to jump down one page at a time.
Be sure to type a space between dir and x:
And also between x: and /p

Just checked the operation of my copy of the floppy.

1. It didn't ask for permission to load the driver; just went ahead and loaded it regardless, which is good.

2. It did indeed give the drive the letter x. :)

3. I typed the command as above with an old Win95 optical disk [CD] in the drive and a list of all the folders on the disk were displayed.
If you get the same result it means there's nothing wrong with the drive hardware or the disk.

Thanks for the explanation. It did say it loaded the cd driver. At A when I typed in dir x: /p I got "not ready read driver x."

I really think the problem is with Windows not recognizing it as a cd drive and listing it unknown. If I delete the driver and reboot Windows will detect it as Sony CRX216E CD RW but then it puts it in "unknown" in the device manager. I have seen that other people have had this problem and one solution was to delete the upperfilters and lowerfilters in regedit but I don't even have those.

1. "I really think the problem is with Windows not recognizing it as a cd drive and listing it unknown"
Did you have a [good?] Windows or data CD in the drive [the correct way up?] at the time, and had you given enough time after closing the drawer for the drive to read the disk before giving the command to read it?

There is a problem with this drive even before Windows comes on the scene, since even DOS cannot read the contents of [good?] CD's in the drive.

I'd bet that if you solve this problem, then Windows probably won't have any problem with it.
See I am getting a "Not ready reading drive" error trying to use the drive (http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/comp/cd/errorsNotReady-c.html).
There are multi-various possible causes listed there; check them out.
Try another [known to work] optical drive in the system.

Just as an update - I did a Windows repair install and Windows then was able to recognize the drive. It still didn't work properly though so I replaced it and now it's fine. I should have just done that in the first place.

Paula

My own [good?] new Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-112D drive can work perfectly well with all the disks I've tried...
Except now I've found a set of 3 CD-RW 2-speed disks that were used to make an HP Simple Backup backup in 2005 of a now scrapped HP Brio BA...
And the drive cannot do anything with these particular disks...
It cannot read the disk ["Please insert a disk in the drive"], so they cannot be erased or written to. :(

Don't you just gotta love these things?..............NOT!