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Have an odd situation here - or maybe not.
Family member called me on this one. They reported their 4-year old Acer CDRW drive is no longer reading any CDs. So I popped on over their and took a look. The computer was on when I arrived. I put a store-bought CD (about 10 years old) in, the green drive light came on briefly, and sure enough no audio files were seen on it when I pulled up the CD drive in Explorer. No errors, just a blank folder, and right-click/eject did eject the disk. Tried another CD and same thing happened. So I assumed that, at the very least, the READ laser was dead. These were my CDs I tried, kept in my car.
I picked up a NEC 3540 DVDRW drive from Newegg and two weeks later was over at the house again. Shut down the PC and installed it easily. Drive read the same CDs I had tried before with no problem - even played the audio tracks in Winamp. Noticed that their version of Nero was so old that it did not support DVD-burning, but didn't have the software with me so decided that could wait till another day. So I left.
Got a call later that night saying I had done nothing to solve their problem, it still wasn't reading any disks (their disks), even stating the drive light was not coming on upon inserting a CD. Now I was angry, I had just been there and had no problems.
So I was over there again yesterday morning, the computer had been left on. Put my same CD in - no dice, but the drive light did come on. Scratched my head a bit - it was the same symptoms as before - blank folder through Explorer, no audio files listed. On a whim I rebooted the computer and it read all disks (of mine) fine again. I had to leave but before I did I ran a small tool I downloaded to remove the Sony rootkit (NOT Sony's Remover) and also tried the fix for it from the Command prompt - but neither found anything.
Now, at this time I have no idea if this family member just keeps trying the same and only one disk - I have a feeling this is the case though. Is this a cause and effect of the Sony copy-protection (or another distributer's) or should I be looking elsewhere for the problem? I did check their virus scanner which had clean daily reports, but I did not get the chance to run Spyware scans (AdAware and Spybot are installed on this machine).
Any ideas, folks? I apologize for the long read, I am known to be long-winded. Thanks.
Family member called me on this one. They reported their 4-year old Acer CDRW drive is no longer reading any CDs. So I popped on over their and took a look. The computer was on when I arrived. I put a store-bought CD (about 10 years old) in, the green drive light came on briefly, and sure enough no audio files were seen on it when I pulled up the CD drive in Explorer. No errors, just a blank folder, and right-click/eject did eject the disk. Tried another CD and same thing happened. So I assumed that, at the very least, the READ laser was dead. These were my CDs I tried, kept in my car.
I picked up a NEC 3540 DVDRW drive from Newegg and two weeks later was over at the house again. Shut down the PC and installed it easily. Drive read the same CDs I had tried before with no problem - even played the audio tracks in Winamp. Noticed that their version of Nero was so old that it did not support DVD-burning, but didn't have the software with me so decided that could wait till another day. So I left.
Got a call later that night saying I had done nothing to solve their problem, it still wasn't reading any disks (their disks), even stating the drive light was not coming on upon inserting a CD. Now I was angry, I had just been there and had no problems.
So I was over there again yesterday morning, the computer had been left on. Put my same CD in - no dice, but the drive light did come on. Scratched my head a bit - it was the same symptoms as before - blank folder through Explorer, no audio files listed. On a whim I rebooted the computer and it read all disks (of mine) fine again. I had to leave but before I did I ran a small tool I downloaded to remove the Sony rootkit (NOT Sony's Remover) and also tried the fix for it from the Command prompt - but neither found anything.
Now, at this time I have no idea if this family member just keeps trying the same and only one disk - I have a feeling this is the case though. Is this a cause and effect of the Sony copy-protection (or another distributer's) or should I be looking elsewhere for the problem? I did check their virus scanner which had clean daily reports, but I did not get the chance to run Spyware scans (AdAware and Spybot are installed on this machine).
Any ideas, folks? I apologize for the long read, I am known to be long-winded. Thanks.