CD drives "not accesseble" when audio disks inserted

[passatista]

Whenever I insert an audio CD into either the D (Pioneer) or E (Plextor) drives, left-clicking on the CD icon brings up, after as much as a 10-15 second delay, the message: ?D (or E):\ is not accessible. Incorrect function.? But if I then right-click on the same icon, again after a longish interval, the audio CD?s contents will display. Then, after having been opened once, the CD will open when left-clicked. It will also open if I first right-click on the CD icon, click anywhere outside of the drop down menu, and then left-click the icon. That CD will then open properly until ejected, and all goes to Hell again.

Strangely, this only occurs with audio CD?s ? game or data CD?s function correctly; tho often many seconds pass before the contents are displayed. I am also able to burn normally CD's. Also, audio CD?s will play if opened from any of the players in my system (WMP 7.1, WinAmp, RealJukebok)

Furthermore, the text name of both CD icons will usually remain that of the first CD successfully opened in its drive until the computer is rebooted. Tho sometimes, after ejecting the CD and closing the C drive, the drives will revert to their default icons.

When inserting CD?s into the drives, audio CD?s will never start to spin, while data or game CD?s usually do.

The drives were both working properly until a week ago, when I did the following:

1) updated W2K to SP3
2) removed EasyCD Creator 4.05 from the system ? being careful to remove all the bad stuff from the registry . also removed the cdr4_2k.sys and cdalw2k.sys Adaptec system files used by EasyCD that cause problems with other CD recording software
3) installed Nero 5.5.9 Burning Rom
4) installed Feurio
5) uninstalling the Default Windows Media Player (not v7.1, but the version that came with system)
6) installed CloneCD ClonyXXL (latest)

Attempting to solve the problem, I have, after deleting the WINNT Temp folder contents:

1) Uninstalled and then reinstalled all CD related software (players and burners) from the system
2) put back EasyCD, leaving the other burners out (now only EasyCD 5 Platinum in system)
3) upgraded the Plextor?s firmware, tho not the Pioneer?s because it involves manually editing autoexec.nt and config.nt files
4) removed and added back the CD drive letters via Disk Management.
5) using Add/Remove hardware, I uninstalled the drives which were then reinstalled on reboot
6) changed and changed back the ?enable cd digital playback? parameters of both drives and the players.

Nothing helps.

I am now dead in the water, and humbly await the advice from the cognoscenti digitali that freguent this site.

W2K SP3
ASUS A7M266 mobo
AMD 1.33 GHz CPU
512 MB RAM
120 GB HD (two 60 GB IBM drives in RAID 0 config)
Win 2000 Promise FastTrack 100 RAID controller
Terratec EWX 2496 sound card
Hercules 3D Prophet III (GeForce3) graphics card
Pioneer A05s DVD ROM drive
Plextor 16/10/40A PlexWriter
(everything with latest drivers and firmware)

 

[WooYing]

Not sure what going on but I'm thinking that there is something wrong with the cd player itself. I am not sure if you know this but there are cd's out the that will not work in a computer cd. It a copy protection that they have, right on the cd itself. So my suggestion is to try using a older cd and see if it works if not then I suggest getting a RMA and fixing ASAP before the warrenty runs out. Good Luck,....

 

[FluxCapacitor]

Sounds like you removed some files you shouldn't have when you were "being careful to remove all the bad stuff from the registry", and deleting other things like Windows Media Player.

I don't know, that's just my thought.

You could try reinstalling SP3 again and seeing if that helps. I'm not real sure why you deleted Windows Media Player, but you should try putting it back on. Why? Because it could be a file association problem, like maybe Windows doesn't know what program to use to read/open cda files anymore. That's the problem with deleting programs from Windows that were the default programs to open files with. You might try looking at your file types list and see what's what. Otherwise I would say you're probably going to have to reinstall 2000 unless you can figure out what got deleted that shouldn't have, but don't do that until you've tried everything else.

 

[FluxCapacitor]

Also.... There's nothing wrong with your CD and DVD players.

Another reason I say it's a file association problem is because you can play the CDs from within other programs like Winamp, Real, etc. Most likely because they are using their program instead of the default (which is most likely set to nothing now) program to read the cda files.

 

[passatista]

Thank you Flux. Yes, now I also think that the problem was file-association related, (otherwise why only audio CD's?) and I also thought deleting the default Windows Media Player was pretty stupid. Before the first post, I tried to recover it from the W2K CD, but couldn't seem to find it. However, before I could put your suggestion to the test, I was presented with another alternative, by no less than the much despised EasyCD.

When I last booted up the computer, I received a warning from EasyCD that "autodetect" was not enabled and that this might effect the performance of my CD drives. This was odd in that I have had this problem for more than a week, and in that time I've booted the computer dozens of times, and never encountered this warning.

I clicked yes that I wanted to enable autodetect. Upon reboot, all was well; even the icon labeling issue was resolved - which also occured with data CD's.

I'm not even sure where in the system this autodect was enabled or even if the problem was caused by EasyCD. A search through EasyCD's preferences produced no reference to this option. Probably EasyCD finally noticed the problem and offered me the option of reassociating cda files.

I've had so many CD related programs in and out of the system (not to mention the SP3 update) that I have no idea which, if any, was the culprit.

But most likely, in all the sofware comings and goings, cda files had become disassociated from any parent program.

Thanks again. This is a great forum.