re: optical drives wont clear themselves of previous reads
Wednesday, March 2, 2005 at 5:25 am
Windows Me Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Jack Gulley
(5917 messages posted)
Your CD-Rom drives must have a cache memory in them large enough to hold the volume
table of contents of the CD's you are viewing. If you power down (instead of just
rebooting) for at least 15 seconds, it should clear all information of the "prior"
CD.
Go to Device Manager and expand the CDROM listing and for each of the drives verify
that the Properties for both show under the that Driver tab the default Microsoft
driver 06/08/2000. And that under the Settings tab, Options, "Disconnect"
and "Auto insert notification" are checked.
If you have some how installed CD-Rom drivers for an older system/adapter and
are not using the default drivers built into Windows ME, this can happen. Might also
happen if you are using SCSI attached CD-Rom drives (but you would have said so).
It is also possible that one of the CD-Rom drives is defective/failing and causing
both the fail to notify the system of a disk change. You can test for this by unplugging
the IDE cable to one of the drives and seeing if the remaining drive works OK by
itself.
Last, with CD-RW and DVD drives, you load additional drivers that could be causing
problems. First try going to the software providers web site and downloading the
latest updates for your version of burner software. Might just fix the problem. If
not, it might require removing all vestiges of burner and DVD software and their
drivers to see if they are the problem, and then installing them again.
I also recall seeing this type of problem with one of the versions of Windows
Media Player updates to Windows ME, when using a PCI bus IDE card to add extra ID
drives. CD-RW drives often have strange problems when attached to these cards instead
of the onboard IDE adapter. Has to do with the drives not getting a device reset
signal during a reboot. This could also be a system board problem or IDE cable problem
with them not getting reset. If your system board BIOS shows the IDE devices, make
sure they also show the CD-Rom drives.
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