DVD Drives & CDR Drives not seeing CDs anymore

[foxmid]

Hi, recently my computer has been acting up. I know the strain of ripping, encoding, and burning DVDR has got to be much for hardware, but now my XP is acting up. Here's what is happening.

When I insert a regular data CD or CDR or CDRW into either my Sony DVD burner, my Sony DVD ROM drive, or my Yamaha CD burner, Windows XP doesn't recognize the disc.

The drive itself does, I can open Nero and look and see a session on the disc. I can also go into Disk Management and see it as a volume (file size, healthy, etc)

Strangely enough, if I boot up with a CD in the drive before windows loads, the CD works fine. However, once I eject it, and put either it, or another CD in, same problem. (Please insert a disk into xx...)

My config is this: Windows xp pro SP1a & full patchset. Nero 5.5, DVD Decrypter 3.1.7, Daemon Tools, 40, 80, & 160 HDD, 1gig RAM, athlon 2600.

Anyone run into this before?
Thanks for any assistance.

[UGAthecat]

When I have minor difficulty reading discs (drive hanging on errors and not working properly even after a reboot) I usually just remove the drives from device manager, then the IDE controller from device manager, and reboot letting everything redetect and reinstall after the reboot. That seems to fix things up most of the time.
usually when my system has as much trouble as yours is having reading a disc it is because the drive is dead, or close to it, but I normally can't even see a session on a disc so this case has me curious.

[foxmid]

I'm not entirely sure, but it may have something to do with Daemon Tools. Initially, when I got this program to work, I would try and mount the ISO, and nothing would really happen. After changing the setting to two virtual drives, the second one (j drive, in my case) would work, and then the first would work as well.

I think something may change how Windows XP deals with inserted media? To look for DVDs and ignore CDs?

I'm an IT honcho, do this for a living, so it really frustrates me when I stumble upon an issue that I have no solution for. Especially when it's on my own machine!

Update - My CD burner is seeing CDs again, (once I rebooted with a CD already in the drive). Now I can swap for any CD or CDR I've got.

Pretty sure that two of my drives are still in great shape - my DRU-510A is pretty new, haven't even gotten through my first spindle yet, and my burner is only about 15 - 30 burns old (after being remanufactured, since it died under warranty)

My Sony DVD ROM is giving me weird read errors during rips, especially on DVD-R media that I have burnt myself, so I think it may be time to replace 'er.

I'll post up a reply if anything new develops.

[UGAthecat]

you may be on to something with daemon tools info. I don't use daemon tools, but another program called Phantom CD (i think thats the name). Anyway, when I have Phantom CD drives active, I can't use EAC because it doesn't recognize any audio cds at all. As soon as I disable phantom CD's virtual drives EAC works perfectly, and I also don't run into the problem where I have to remove drives from device manager as often when the virtual drives are disabled.
So if daemon tools is doing something similar enough to what phantom cd is doing, it could be screwing with windows and other programs reading the disc.
I too work in IT, which is why I was curious about this issue. Unfortunately for me I'm stuck in a helpdesk, and helpdesks are like black holes.