Maybe I am not communicating properly or something. The optical drive quit
part-way through and then the monitor feed went out as well. This has
nothing to do with cleaning the cd's or moving the drive to a different PCI
connection. It is either the board or the cpu. Without the monitor feed, I
cannot do anything because I cannot see what it is I am doing.
Now I hope that is clearer for everyone. How do I determine the cause of
this misadventure?
Thanks.
Good luck if you can't use the display, Daryl.
For Andrew's sake: I was NOT referring to the drive itself when I
suggested cleaning the "CD/DVDs". If I were referring to the drives
themselves (obviously, I never would, being a halfway-intelligent
man), I would say "take the drives out and wash them." What do you
think I am, an idiot?
Anyway, I've never had problems with washing CD/DVD media with a
little mild handsoap and tepid water, as long as I carefully dried and
polished them. For many years, I had to wash the PrintShop disks
before installing PrintShop, because my DVD reader/writer would simply
disappear from Windows half-way through the installation. If I
cleaned the disk beforehand, I never had this problem.
Replacing the drive solved this problem at the time for good. But I
still make sure to clean and polish the media carefully before
attempting to reinstall that particular product. The fact is,
Bruderbund at that time was sending out very dirty media. Cleaning
and polishing it cause the laser to work better, resulting in a better
installation experience.
The way I know it was a combination of dirty disks and a failing
CD/DVD drive was that this happened with almost ANY CD/DVD media in
that drive. Cleaning and polishing it ALWAYS enabled me to finish
installation of the application(s) I wanted to install, and replacing
the drive cleared up the problem completely.
Face it, a laser DOESN'T use microwaves or other forms of energy which
can see through obstructions, such as greasy, dirty, cloudy spots on
the media, fingerprints, etc. If the media is extremely cloudy and
dirty, the drive will experience read errors to such an extent that it
will lose its registration with Windows, and drop off Device Manager
or Windows Explorer listings completely.
As they say, "A man with an experience is more authoritative than a
man with a theory."
--
Donald L McDaniel
How can so many otherwise very intelligent people screw up
something so simple so badly? If you stick a computer
keyboard in front of most people, they'll suddenly drop
30 points off their IQs. Much like placing a "Pork Barrel"
bill in front of a politician: He'll forget all about
"cooperation" the minute he counts the zeroes before the
decimal point.
