Cdroms fading fast

[Kawaii Oni]

I'm having problems with both my cdrom and cd burner. The cdrom is a 32x Mitsumi and the burner is a 2x Memorex(so slow). I'm running Win 98 sec ed. I have 128 megs of ram and a Pentium II 300mhz processor.

If I put a cd in either of these drives 9 times out of 10 I'll get an explorer crash and have to restart my computer. If there is a cd in either drive when I restart it will just crash explorer again. I've had the same setup for over a year with no trouble. Just in the last week or so they've been going downhill rapidly. It started with them taking a little longer to become accessible. While spinning up it would lock the computer. If you ejected the disc the computer would unlock. Not anymore. Now once it's locked there's nothing to do but restart. If you do a ctrl-alt-dlt you'll see that explorer is not responding.

I've tried uninstalling the drives and reinstalling them with new drivers. I've also done all updates to my windows. I have a hard time believing that both drives are dying at the same time and in the same way which is why I'm looking elsewhere for answers. Could it be hardware problem somewhere else causing this? Or does it sound like a software problem? Should I bite the bullet and reinstall Windows(providing I can install from the cd)? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Heather F.

[spondylolisthesis]

I've had the same problem I think, however it was with my CD-R/RW and did not affect my CD-ROM. I think you are on track in your reasoning that it would be unlikely to have similar modes of failure in both drives at the same time.

The problem with my CD-R/RW turned out to be somehow related to inserting a "packet written" (drag and drop moving/writing) CD-RW in the drive without the requisite program loaded and running. My drive would take a long time to spin up, then the red (write) LED would come on and stay on, then windows explorer would crash.

The solution in my case was to make sure the packet write program was started whenever I wanted to use the packet write feature.

[Paleo Pete]

Daniel J Mathews I deleted your post. I have already requested once that you stop recommending reinstalling Windows unless it is absolutely a last resort. I will delete EVERY future post of that nature until you get the message.

If we put our heads together we might be able to figure this out and fix it without a reinstall. I've been noticing a lot of problems with CD's and CD burners on the forum lately, when installed together. Let's see if we can figure out what the problem is. Reinstalling won't help, the problem will simply come back.

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