Keyboard & Mouse freeze when CP CDRW accessed

[RCL]

I have: AMD K6-III 450Mhz, 40Gb HD, MoBo Aladdin 5, BIOS Award 4.51, TDK CDRW 121032 CR-ROM, Win ME. All programs work fine, except when I try to open the E drive (CD-ROM) to play some music. The PC freezes and I have to reboot. Also, when I open the Control Panel to check the Device parameters of the CDRW drive, the PC freezes when I click OK or Cancel.
When I use Power Desk to access the E drive it shows the contents of that drive without freezing the PC. When NERO looks for the CDRW drive, it also freezes the PC. I tried removing the CD-ROM drive and rebooting, but the same thing happens. Any suggestions?

[Budfred]

Welcome to PCGuide!

Have you tried removing the CDs driver software and reinstalling. That is probably what I would try to do at this point. You go to Device Manager, click on the CD entry and then click Remove. Reboot and windows should detect the drive and attempt to install. Have the driver software handy and instruct Windows to find and install it. If this doesn't work, post back here with details about what happened.

Oh, another thought. You may want to use Task Manager to see if you have anything running that might somehow interfere with your CD. If needed, you can use msconfig to selectively cancel out programs and see if the system runs better without them. Let us know if you need help to do that.

Good luck,
Budfred

[RCL]

Thanks for your suggestions. I checked for running programs, turned them off, removed the TDK CR-ROM drive in the Device Mgr, rebooted. The PC came back on, did not tell me it was installing new drivers, and when I looked at the Device Mgr, there it was listed again. I put in a music CD and clicked on a selection, the PC froze up again. What next?

[Budfred]

If you have the driver software, I would go to the Device Manager again and use the Update Drivers to try and install the driver directly from the disk.

Also, if you found programs running that looked likely to be effecting the CD and closed them in Task Manager, they would have reloaded at boot. You might want to close them and try to run the CD. If it doesn't freeze everything up, you can go into msconfig and select them out so that they no longer load at boot.

Also, is this a new CD drive or did the problem just start recently?

Good luck,
Budfred

[david eaton]

Hi RCL. You said that you removed the CD drive in device manager. Was that in Safe Mode? If not, try it that way, and then reboot.

Using safe mode usually ensures that "ghost"drivers are removed as well.

David