I pushed the ‘open’ button on my CD drive last night, and it didn’t open. I tried clicking on the disc icon in the systray, but it wasn’t there. So I tried rebooting. Nope. I used ‘Gateway Go-Back’ to revert my hard drive to an earlier date. No joy. I went to Settings|Control Panel and clicked on Disc Detector. Illegal operation. I clicked on ‘Details’ and this is what it said:
RUNDLL32 caused an invalid page fault in
module <unknown> at 0000:760e1470.
Registers:
EAX=81bb2820 CS=0187 EIP=760e1470 EFLGS=00010246
EBX=81bb27c0 SS=018f ESP=023fff9c EBP=023fffcc
ECX=dc483f50 DS=018f ESI=00000008 FS=5377
EDX=81bb2820 ES=018f EDI=81ba6420 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
The fact that it doesn’t open when you push the physical button on it leads me to believe it is a hardware problem. It should open as long as it has power when you do that.
Pop the case. Make sure the power wire to the drive is secure at the drive and motherboard.
Make sure the data connection is secure on both ends too.
Try to force it open with the small paperclip hole on the front of the drive. Maybe something got wedged in there and is screwing things up.
If all that fails, you may need a new one but they are pretty cheap and easy to find. Even Wal-Mart sells them.
Another last-ditch thing you can try, especially before taking it out of the machine, is if you open up My Computer, right-click on the CD drive icon, you can select “Eject” to get the CD out of it. If that doesn’t work, it’s pretty toasted.
Another, really last-ditch thing to try: Take it out of the system, reboot, and if there’s still a CD drive listed, remove it. Then power down, reinstall the drive, and start it up again. It might find the hardware and reload the drivers that may be missing.
Does the BIOS detect the cdrom? If not, it wont be seen in windows either. I’m also leaning to the hardware side of the problem if it wont open. Try reseating the power connector, or changing to another one if possible. If its still not detected try swapping the IDE cable on the back of the CDROM and Hard Drive, and see if one or the other remains undetected.
If the drive doesn’t open there may be a power problem. When you switch the machine on, does the LED on the front of the drive light up or flash? If not, remove the power connector and plug in another.
This week I got a couple of ‘interesting’ dialog boxes. It says that my mailbox became disconnected (or something like that) and I need to enter my password. Smells fishy to me. So I click on the ‘cancel’ button, which locks up my computer necessitating a hard re-boot. I think I must have lost the CD drive after the first time that thing came up.
I run a virus scan every week. It’s also running in the background, so that it will catch any viruses that attempt to infect my computer. (And I have Live Update, so that I get current virus descriptions.) My webmail is set up to intercept and delete any e-mail containing a virus.
Last night the suspicious dialog box popped up again. I reverted the hard drive to midnight, used the free virus scanner at housecall.com, and I ran a defrag before I went to bed. Today I ran Norton, Ad-Aware, and Spybot Search & Destroy. (FWIW, no viruses were found by either antivirus program.) Somewhere along the line, I noticed the Disc Detector icon in systray. I was able to open the CD drive by pushing the button.
