Hi - over the past 3 weeks or so I've had difficulty reading CD's. IE gets so far then hangs, applications that need the drive fail with either bad blocks appearing in the event viewer or some other issue but that's the most common. DVD's are a little better in that most of the time they play but as soon as I try to access the menu for the DVD that's when I get hangs or similar errors to the CD's. Needless to say I've checked out all disks used in another machine, so I know they are OK.
I've tried using a couple of bootable CD's to see if this occurs outside of the WinXP environment - I hear the system trying to access the drive and then finally it boots from the hard disk. I've tried Nero's CD Speed to test the drive out and that comes up with an unrecognisable error! Other than when these hangs appear (sometimes so severe I switch the notebook off) XP thinks the drive is fine. I've tried uninstalling and redetecting the drive and that makes no difference.
Seems to me that the drive is going (or almost gone). Is there anything else I can do to confirm this? I see that replacements are costly - so much so that it'd be better value to buy a new machine!
Many thanks for any replies.
I've tried using a couple of bootable CD's to see if this occurs outside of the WinXP environment - I hear the system trying to access the drive and then finally it boots from the hard disk. I've tried Nero's CD Speed to test the drive out and that comes up with an unrecognisable error! Other than when these hangs appear (sometimes so severe I switch the notebook off) XP thinks the drive is fine. I've tried uninstalling and redetecting the drive and that makes no difference.
Seems to me that the drive is going (or almost gone). Is there anything else I can do to confirm this? I see that replacements are costly - so much so that it'd be better value to buy a new machine!
Many thanks for any replies.
