Temperamental CD/DVD drive

[shermie]

Hi Guys,

You were a great help last month when i was putting together a new system & 'am hoping that you'll beable to do it again.

everything seems to be ticking along quite nicely till I put a CD or DVD in, the disc spins up like its being read but then everything grinds to a stop with programmes not responding.
This results in me stabbing at the reset button beacause i lose patience & can't be bothered waiting the 15-20 minutes it then takes to shutdown.

Its a Liteon lightscribe dvd drive - I know this works as it was used to install everything (& does very occassionally work normally).
Since it last worked, a week ago, i've only installed spy sweeper, this has since been uninstalled-just incase-but made no difference.

All the cables have been checked, several times, & are fully pushed in & secure.
The Bios has been updated and is currently set at the defaults, checking on the crucial website the ram voltage is set correct at 1.80V.

As I've never done any overclocking before - i haven't fancied messing about with the settings without any advice as i'd likely cook everthing.

Any ideas what I have or haven't done to cause this?

[d3fiant]

what OS? also is it a common disc, for example my BF2 disc got so scratched I had to download a warez copy to use to boot from otherwise I would get a very similar lockup everytime I inserted the disc. I also had a troublesome Samsung SATA DVDRW which needed its firmware updated to solve a problem with spindown times, while not related u may find ur particular model has an updated firmware which may help.

mmmm, what else... do you have any software running which checks for new media, even something simple as the auto insert notification, I always turn that off but thats a personal choice.

If I think of anything else I will post but some more info on OS, if its certain discs or all discs, also what controller the drive is on, i.e. I have 3 seperate SATA controllers on my mobo that I can connect my SATA optical drive to, before a previous bios update one of them particularly had an issue with the SATA mode, i.e. IDE,vs AHCI or RAID

blimey I do waffle on

[shermie]

Running Vista (oh why did I upgrade from XP?)
I've tried numerous discs, a couple of which have only been used a couple of times-no scratching at all.

Firmware is up todate - its an IDE drive
Just got the auto load / notifiaction thingy ma-jig that runs when a disc is inserted.

[d3fiant]

heres a thought, lets see if its a particular resource, start task manager, right click on ur task bar to get that, make sure processes for all users are shown then order by CPU by clicking on the top of the CPU column. Next insert a CD and see if a particular process is hogging CPU. If not then we could set up a permon collection to track usage providing the hang does not kill the monitoring.

Just an idea

[Richh]

If it's an IDE drive Shermie, it'll be connected via the IDE1 port on the motherboard, yes? If so, what drivers are you running on the JMB363 controller, and how is the drive jumpered (i.e master, slave or cable select)?

I'd also, just to eliminate it as a cause, and if you have the option, try another IDE optical drive jumpered the same way, and see if that changes things at all.

[shermie]

OK then,

I had task manager running & put in a DVD - System Idle sat at between 97-99% through out.
Then fired up media centre & tried to play DVD through that, that let me with a black screen so brought up the desktop with the keyboard & closed media centre with the task manager. WerFault.exe quickly rose to 27% then back to 0.

Checked the jumpers this was set on to Slave at the time, set to Master & tried the above with the same results.
Except SVCHost rose to 14%, again very quickly dropped back off + there seemed quite a lot of HDD activity.

Then put replaced the Liteon drive with an iomega zipCD - system wouldn't fully boot - kept getting stuck at the "green bar" screen (reset bios and checked was booting from correct drive).
Replaced Liteon drive booted 1st time no hassle.

Had aquick look at the controller - think i found the right one it is:
jmicron JMB36x
driver 1.17.19.2

hope all this means something to you coz it doesn't to me!

[Richh]

Okay, first thing to try is an update for those drivers. Have a bash with these and let us know what gives:

ftp://driver.jmicron.com.tw/jmb36x/W....17.31WHQL.zip

Also, have a look at the controller mode in the Onboard PCI Devices section of the BIOS, and make certain it's set to IDE.

[shermie]

Don't want to jump the gun here -but that updated driver seems to have worked so far.

Its been running an hour or so with it on & the DVD drive has been behaving since then.
I've tried a few different cd's /DVD's & they all played 1st time without locking up windows...

I'll post in a few days with an update, with any luck everything will still be running.

Cheers