Help: D:/ Drive

RAMONES · #1 October 14th, 2003, 03:22 AM

Several things:
1.) My D:/ drive (CD-ROM reader is an HP CD-Writer 9700+) never works; for example when I put in a CD for a computer game the game never runs, I'll do Start, Run, and then choose the game and it still won't run. The message is always something like "The disk is not formatted" or "Error: Access Violation."
By the way, the CD is clean, trust me, and has worked before (just yesterday in fact)
2.) Messages saying that I have "Unsafely ejected the 'HP CD-Writer 9700' device" keep popping up out of nowhere; I'll just be surfing the Internet or something and it will still pop up.
3.) Compared to when the game (Rollercoaster Tycoon if you really want to know) was able to run, the computer seems really quiet, like nothing's happening; I was wondering if that was a problem...

PS--- OS is Windows 2000

THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR ANY HELP....IT IS GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!

Alfons · #2 October 14th, 2003, 04:07 PM

See if it works with DOS by using something like the W98 Startup Disk. If it recognizes the drive and loads the driver, you can see if it's capable of reading by putting a data CD of some variety into it and at the command prompt, which should look like this:

A:\>

make it look like this and press Enter:

A:\>D:

It will then look like this:

D:\>

make it look like this and press Enter:

D:\>DIR

This instructs DOS to list the directory on the D drive which should be your CD Drive from what you've described, and if everything in the drive is working properly, you'll get a list of the directories (folders) and files in the Root Directory of that drive. If you get an error message, you're Read Circuit in the CD Drive is probably malfunctioning - they're not repairable.

P.S. If your hard drive is configured with NTFS, DOS won't see it, so the CD Drive will come out as drive D because the startup disk creates a RAM Drive that will be labeled as C. If it's configured with FAT32, then your CD Drive letter will probably be E, but when DOS installs the driver, it will let you know the letter that was chosen for the CD Drive.