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January 26th, 2005 15:00
cd rw will not read discs
I have a dvd rom and a cd rw rom. The cd rom will not read a disc when i put one in. the drive shows up on my computer, but will not read. when i put something in, the light flashes for a while then goes out. it appears to be trying to read it, but nothing happens. this happens with games, music - anything i try to load.
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DELL-Stephen S
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January 26th, 2005 19:00
Randall,
Thank you for visiting the Dell Community Forum.
If both of the drives are showing the problem at the same time, it is unlikely that the drives themselves are the problem, but the first thing I would do is test the drive on a hardware level to determine if the symptoms that you are having are caused by a hardware issue or a possible software problem. The following will work for both drives.
To test the drive you will need your Windows CD and a CDROM boot diskette. You can download a CDROM boot disk from our web site to use. From the Dell Download page search for and download the file DIAGFT32.EXE - once this file is downloaded, run the file and it will extract to a floppy disk to create a CDROM bootable floppy disk.
Put both of these (floppy disk & CD) in the drives and restart your system. At the startup menu, pick the option to start with CDROM support. This will boot the system to an A:\ prompt and try to load the CDROM drivers; it should tell you what drive letter it assigns to the CDROM drive, usually D: or E:. From the A: prompt, type in D: (or what ever drive letter was assigned) and then press ENTER. Next type in DIR and press enter. If it gives you a directory of files, then most likely the CDROM drive is mechanically working and you will need to trouble-shoot the software on the system. If you get some sort of error message, then you will need to do hardware trouble-shooting on the CDROM drive.
If the drive does not read when you boot from the floppy disk, the next thing to try is clearing the NVRAM (see below) and reseating (unplugging and reconnecting) the data cable (wide grey ribbon cable) for the CDROM at both ends before repeating the test above. If the drive is still not reading, you will want to contact Dell technical support as the drive may need to be replaced.
If the drive works when you boot to the CD boot disk, try going into the Device Manager in Windows and remove the CD drive, restart the system and allow the drive to be detected again to see if that helps.
You can find information on clearing the NVRAM on most Dimension systems in the Dell Online Knowledge Base article located at the following web address:
http://support.dell.com/us/en/kb/document.asp?DN=1023538