I'm back and the CD player pops tray out and back again

[Felecha]

Visiting with my mom, she has a Dell Dimension 2400. Last time I was here I got frustrated that it seemed so slow, so yesterday I added to the 256MB of RAM with a new 1GB stick of memory. Got it from Crucial, and put it in myself, I have put lots of memory sticks in, I dont know what that could have to do with it, but that is the only thing new that I know of.

This morning, the drawer of the CD player has been popping out and going back in all by itself. At first, I saw it out, wondering did I leave it out? Did I even open it? So I put it in, then saw it out again later. I was then sitting in the room and saw it come out by itself. After a bit it went in by itself. It slowly happened more, until it was going in and out again and again. I tried manually hitting the eject button, to disrupt whatever it was doing, but did not seem to get it under control, finally rebooted. It actually went in and out a couple of times during the reboot. Then it stopped.

???

Not doing it right now, for the last 10 minutes.

Any ideas?

 

[Felecha]

started doing it again, after a couple of hours ....

spooky!

 

[Felecha]

Dont know if this is of any use, but I wondered what disabling the CD drive in Device Manager would do - no change, it still pops out and in

!!!!

 

[Felecha]

Oh MY! What happened?

I was thinking about disabling the CDRom and how it didnt seem to do anything. I wondered if maybe it would disable if I rebooted after setting it to Disable in Device Manager. But at the reboot, the BIOS start took a LONG time, and then I got the DOS screen which said something like "Secondary drive not found. Hit F1 to continue, F2 to go to Setup." So I hit F1 and it went to the Windows XP black splash screen with the logo and the blue progress bar thingie, and just stayed there, never did complete booting.

I started over, and went to F2, where I more or less am familiar in the Setup screen, and it showed Primary master as the Hard Drive, Primary Slave Off, Secondary master was Unknown Device, Secondary SLave Off. That sounded reasoable.

Next try, stalled again at the splash. I noticed that the green indicator light for HD activity never did show any flickering at all. I had disable the HD?

I am 100% sure I had Disabled the CD Rom, not the hard drive. I was careful in Device Manager. It was the DVD/CD-ROM DRIVES item, definitely. Definitely.

I tried Safe Mode, it spilled out all the device and sys stuff, but stopped at the end of the list. No Safe Mode screen ever came.

Two more tries and the last one, it did go through to finally booting to the Desktop. And it has been up now for an hour or more, and no CDRom tray in and out.

AND, in Device Manager the CDRom is back to Enabled, I didn?t set it back myself.

Scary, and kinda weird.

 

[RebateMonger]

I had that happen with a ten-year-old CD-ROM drive that I put into a desktop the other day. It kept opening and closing itself. I had to turn off the power to get it to stop. That drive went into the trashcan.

 

[Jiggz]

It could just be coincidence when you added the 1GB ram. So the best way to solve this is to remove the added ram for troubleshooting. Then see if the CD drive still keeps opening and closing still. If it does, then it's time to get a new one. And then re-install the new ram. If the closing and opening of the CD drive stopped after removing the new ram, you might want to try installing the ram sticks one at a time and see what happens.

 

[Felecha]

RebateMonger may have it - the cd has not popped out since the reboot drama, during which I DID have to power off. When it stalled at the XP screen, holding the button in was the only way to start over.

OK, I have also scanned for virus - google brought up lots of pages where the same issue was linked to virus.

 

[Felecha]

RATS!!!

Visiting with Mom again, on the third day of the visit it starts happening again. I rebooted again,hoping that would do it, but after this reboot, the popping is still happening. I would bet it has not been rebooted since I was here last.

Sigh .....

 

[Felecha]

is there a way to disable it but make it easy to turn it back on? If someone wants to actually use the thing, shooting it or removing it makes that kinda hard.

In Device Manager I disabled it but no change.

????

 

[bruceb]

Check the ribbon cable from the motherboard to the cd drive. Good chance it got Pinched when you closed the case and now has 1 or 2 broken wires. Happened on a friend's pc after he opened it for some reason, then the cd drive did not work. A new cable fixed it right up.

 

[Indolent]

Could it be this?

 

[Felecha]

bruceb - I dont have any way to test by replacing the cable, but hey, good idea. I did take the cover off again, and can see that the cable is not anywhere close to where it could have been caught in some way when I added the RAM. I did the RAM 6 weeks ago, but even with a fuzzy memory of it I look and think - no, there's just no way that the cable could have been damaged, pinched in closing the case. It doesnt have much slack and the way it sits right now it's a couple of inches back inside, away from the lid joints. No sign visually of anything like a cut or break or even a tight foldover.

Indolent - that program looks like something purposely installed, right? No one but me and my mom and my brother when he visited could have done any such thing. It's not like a virus getting in, right?

Interesting, though - I shut down to look in at the cable and when I booted up again it started in and out and in and out without stopping, until I put my hand in there and physically stopped it on the way out and made it go back in - two hours ago and no popouts since.

So weird

thanks, all

 

[Felecha]

I think I'll just get a new CD and install it next time I come