fix my cd rom please?

December 19, 2005 4:02 PM

Folks, what on earth is wrong with my dvd/cd drive? If you can fix this i'll shower you with free drink if you ever come to Ireland.

I get the following error message when putting most types of disk into my pc's drive; game dvd's, data cd's, music cd's both burned and original: "D:\ is not accessible. Incorrect Function"

However, when i put in a (store bought) film dvd disk it recognises it and plays it perfectly.

The strange thing is that i havent installed anything recently, or modified my system in any way at all, this behaviour just appeared out of the blue this morning.

I've uninstalled and re-installed the drive, flashed the drive with its latest firmare, and pretty much everything listed on this thread, but still nothing.

The system is win xp home SP2, fully up to date. The drive is an NEC DVD-RW ND-1300A. Firmware 1.0B.

posted by kev23f to computers & internet (7 comments total)

It seems to have died, and since recordable CDs may require different attributes to be read (i.e. a more sensitive pickup loop) you only get error with them so far.

Just spend the $40USD on a new NEC drive and be done with it. If you want to verify first, try a friend's drive in your system and vice versa, but I'll give you 100:1 odds a new drive is your best route.
posted by kcm at 4:12 PM on December 19, 2005

I'd download a Knoppix bootable Linux CD and try booting off of that. If that doesn't work, go with a new drive, as kcm suggested. Of course, this is probably your only CD drive/burner, in which case this will be a problem... Have another machine? If not, you might be able to boot Knoppix from a floppy.

If Knoppix (or some other boot CD) does work, you have a Windows software problem. I've run across more than one Windows machine that refuses to use a CD drive that was perfectly functional. So I'd try that before chucking the old one.

You should also boot into your BIOS and at least check to make sure the BIOS recognizes the drive, but it most likely does.

If it is a Windows problem, I don't know how to fix it short of nuking Windows and starting over, but I'm not a Windows person.

Finally, I have taken apart old CD burners, cleaned them, and very slightly upped the power on the potentiometer of the read head with a slight turn of the screw located thereon: but CD drives are so cheap, it's probably not worth the trouble.
posted by teece at 5:19 PM on December 19, 2005

Do you have any Roxio products installed? See this.
posted by stupidcomputernickname at 5:59 PM on December 19, 2005

Your in Ireland, kev. You're gonna shower us with free drink regardless what we do! :-)
posted by five fresh fish at 6:54 PM on December 19, 2005

I have always found that that error means it's simply unable to read the disc. With a recordable, it is much harder for it to read a burned disc than a pressed factory disc, which is why if it's borderline it probably can't read any -R or -RW or +R things, but it can read a pressed DVD.

I'd say just spend the $30 - $50 on a new one.
posted by Rhomboid at 7:38 PM on December 19, 2005

That message generally means the disc has not been burnt correctly.. However if you recieve it for purchased discs (non burnt ones) it sounds like the drive has gone bad. Just buy a new dvd drive :) I have always used Pioneer drives, however Asus have just released a drive which has 2 year warranty for a little extra $ (Just bought one of these), more of a guarantee'd investment. Good luck
posted by h4inf at 1:30 AM on December 20, 2005

thanks everyone for your replies, and you're right fff, free guinness for everyone regardless!

Just a couple of comments-i did have nero installed, and removing it didnt do anything. God i even followed the advice on this guys page and started using SP1's Atapi drivers instead of SP2's.

The reason i ended up posting here was that lots of people on other forums had found that a new drive wasn't resolving the problem, so i hoped mine was also a software problem.

My pc is a very small function one, looks like a tiny hi-fi, so i'm wary of digging into its guts and installing a new drive, but it looks like i'll have to bite the bullet and go for it.

Thanks again for your help, happy christmas to you all.
posted by kev23f at 3:18 AM on December 20, 2005