Is there a virus that can disable a laptop cd/dvd drive?

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DarkCyber

[H]ard|Gawd
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May 14, 2003
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I have someone that has an HP Pavillion DV6000 laptop and they told me that the cd/dvd drive worked fine up until they got a virus on the computer and then went to Walmart and purchased an AV program and installed and ran the AV program. I think the program was Norton. I have completely scanned and removed everything I can find on the pc with numerous programs, but the cd/dvd drive still does not work.

Here is what the drive does...when a disc is put in the drive light comes on and you can hear and feel the drive spinning (I have tried 3 different drives in the computer and they all do the same thing). The pc will not boot from any disc...they light comes up at boot up, but will not boot. Putting a disc in the drive in Windows and trying to access the disc you get something like drive not ready, insert a disc. All connections are solid. The drive shows up in Windows Explorer as well.

So, is there some specific virus that can disable the drive? Because it can't be a Windows issue because the drive will not work from boot up either...can't be the drive itself...because I have tried 3 known good working drives in it..so has to be something else somewhere.

Any help/input we be much appreciated.

Thanks!
 
if its under warranty call HP

Viruses dont and cant to my knowledge corrupt the cd rom dvd drive NO
 
More than likely it is interfering with the OS accessing the optical drive. It is technically possible to kill any device with upgradeable firmware; not likely though. Get live CD distro and boot it up, or even just a windows repair disk- it will probably work just fine. If it does, it is the OS infected/corrupted.
 
If it doesn't boot to the DVD drive them its most likely a bad DVD drive.
 
Check device manager to see if it is enabled. If it is, I'd try removing it and readding it. Another thought is to go into Disk Management and see what it says.
 
RocketTech said:
More than likely it is interfering with the OS accessing the optical drive. It is technically possible to kill any device with upgradeable firmware; not likely though. Get live CD distro and boot it up, or even just a windows repair disk- it will probably work just fine. If it does, it is the OS infected/corrupted.
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It will not boot from any disc...Windows XP, 7, LInux Live CD, Ultimate Boot CD, BartPE...the drive lights come on and it will continue right on and boot from HD. I do not believe it has anything to do with any system corrupted files, because it will not boot from DOS either. I have also tried 3 drives...two of which I know 100% are good working drives and work perfect in other computers...just non will work in this one. So, that makes me think there is some kind of a hardware problem with the motherboard somewhere then.
 
Laptop from 2006 DVD drive is broken.
Not worth fixing.
Time to buy a new laptop.
Just to be sure, check the BIOS ensure the drive is enabled also run the on board diagnostics from the start up options.
 
I had to update the firmware on a dvd drive once, and it was just a program that ran in windows. So I would imagine it actually IS possible for a virus to screw it up like that by loading a custom/malicious firmware.

Try another drive just for fun, to see if the issue is specific to that drive or something within windows. Actually even if it's within windows it might still work as the drive's ID or whatever will all be different. Could be the virus did something screwy at the windows driver level. If you try another drive and it does work, don't throw out the "bad" drive, it may actually work in another laptop. It would at least be interesting to see the results of this quick test.
 
The drive is enabled in the BIOS. Also, I have tried THREE different drives and all give the same results...so, it is not the drive, thus the reason for my question. It will not boot from any cd...so it is not related Windows.
 
Have you tried changing the boot order? For HP laptops, I think it is ESC or F9 while booting to bring up the one-time boot menu. Select Optical Drive, then see what happens.
 
Sounds like your boot order is setup to boot from HD first, so that is why it isn't booting.

Or plug an External USB Drive (or a flash drive) if you are trying to boot to something else.

Yes, a virus can disable CD/DVD drive usage, USB drives, etc... But this would only be under Windows.
 
jtr8178 said:
Sounds like your boot order is setup to boot from HD first, so that is why it isn't booting.

Or plug an External USB Drive (or a flash drive) if you are trying to boot to something else.

Yes, a virus can disable CD/DVD drive usage, USB drives, etc... But this would only be under Windows.
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I have changed boot order to boot from cd/dvd first and I have also pressed F9 and manually selected the cd/dvd to boot first. The drive light will come on and you can hear the drive spinning but it will just continue on to boot from the HD. This is with any Windows disc, Linux disc, BartPE, Ultimate Boot Disc, Hiren's Boot Disc...etc. I think there is some kind of a hardware issue on the actually motherboard with it...only explanation I can come up with.
 
Probably just the drive is bad. Probably you can get a replacement for $20 or less.

Copy Windows to a flash drive and reinstall from there!
 
athlon1.2 said:
Probably just the drive is bad. Probably you can get a replacement for $20 or less.

Copy Windows to a flash drive and reinstall from there!
Click to expand...

I have tried two additional drives that work perfect in other computers but not in this one...so I don't think it is a bad drive because all of them would have to be bad. None of them work in dos or Windows.
 
Boot to a live USB distro- win7 install on USB is fine, or any of the *nix live distros. Check optical drive function there. Here or Here
Check to make sure the interface used by the optical drive is enabled. For instance, if interface is SATA, make sure SATA interface is enabled and the specific SATA port is enabled.
Is the drive appearing in the BIOS? If not, attempt to upgrade BIOS.
I can't remember the internals of the dv6k off the top of my head, but some laptops use a daugtherboard or ribbon to connect the optical drive- check that.
If all of that turns up nothing, I would suspect the motherboard. Strange that the MoBo would lose a SATA port with no other symptoms though.
 
RocketTech said:
Boot to a live USB distro- win7 install on USB is fine, or any of the *nix live distros. Check optical drive function there. Here or Here
Check to make sure the interface used by the optical drive is enabled. For instance, if interface is SATA, make sure SATA interface is enabled and the specific SATA port is enabled.
Is the drive appearing in the BIOS? If not, attempt to upgrade BIOS.
I can't remember the internals of the dv6k off the top of my head, but some laptops use a daugtherboard or ribbon to connect the optical drive- check that.
If all of that turns up nothing, I would suspect the motherboard. Strange that the MoBo would lose a SATA port with no other symptoms though.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tips...I will check that.

The exact error message I get when I try to access any disc from within Windows is:

E:\is not accessible

The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.

I just forgot to post that message in any of the earlier post and this is with any disc.
 
there is nothing to be done? one day its working one day its not? how would a banal virus infection affect usb and cd at the same time, when all it does is infect HDD?
 
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