Sudden CD rom death?

[Chameleon]

Hi there

Did a reformat and install on my dad's pc yesterday and got XP, AV, firewall installed ........ then when I put the modem driver cd in, it said there was no cd in the drive and was making that kind of spinny whir, but was stopping abruptly and repeating, as if failing at a certain point each time. All other CD's stopped being recognised by the CDrom drive at this point, even after a reboot. Tried uninstalling/reinstalling the CDrom, no luck. Tried booting from the XP cd (as I'd done an hour before to do the format/install), but still no luck.
Seems to me that the drive died .... but it's so odd that it was working perfectly well an hour before, then seemed to have a complete failure ... shortly after the reformat of the harddrive .....

Any thoughts? I find it hard to believe it died so suddenly for no apparant reason, with no sign of problems beforehand.

tia

 

[inactionman]

Is it being detected in the BIOS?

 

[sibanac]

CDrom might have been on its last legs and the heat/stres from installing windows might have been the final push.

Or it could just be a freak accident that samething in the cdrom blew up.

Its also not sure the cd rom didnt have problems before, but you just didnt notice it, if the reading started to die the fault correction would keep it going for a bit longer, till it got to bad

 

[inactionman]

Of course there are also the standard troubleshooting options, does the drive work in another machine, does another drive work in that machine, etc.

Were you doing anything with the hardware? As i've had similar problems in the past and it's turned out to be the IDE cable!

 

[jaba]

If indeed it is buggered, then here is a good place to get another www.scan.co.uk get a nice cd writer and stuff for about £22 cheap as chips!

 

[Chameleon]

Thanks for the replies.
Yes, it is detected in the bios and attempts to access the drive in dos and windows, but fails and reports no disk in the drive. No changes to the hardware at all, though I did try changing the drive to cable select after it started failing, plugged it into the HD's ide cable and it was detected ok again, this time as a slave, but still no luck accessing CD data.
Will try it in another machine and I planned to put my own in his pc to finish the install etc tonight, so will check those two things. Suppose beyond that, it must simply be fux0red then! Damn pc's!!