Plextor driver issue...pls help :/

[Coldy]

Hey guys,

I've had this rig built and running for over 2 months and everything has been running flawlessly. Today though, all of a sudden, my Plextor 40/12/40A CDRW, stopped working. I was trying to burn some files to a CD and NERO was running extremely sluggish, then I got a blue screen and the computer immediately restarted itself. Once everything came back up the cdrw drive wasnt showing up under My Computer. It shows up under the Device Manager, properly labelled, but there is the yellow exclamation mark next to it, and under Device Status it says that windows (2000) could not load the driver for this device. So I tried unloading the driver and reinstalling it. It says it already has a working driver click next to reinstall, so I did, and I still have the same problem. So then I tried uninstalling the device and Scanning for changes. It popped up a window for a second saying it found the CDROM drive and was installing the drivers and then it went straight to the device manager screen where it showed the same error as before. Plextor's website does not supply drivers for download, and so I have no idea where to get a new set of drivers for it to load, or if this will even solve my problem!

Please if anyone knows where I can download drivers for this device or has any suggestions as to what might prove to be a solution, PLEASE let me know. My computer is working fine other than the lack of CDRW drive. Thanks for taking the time to read this

 

[Lord Evermore]

The drivers are standard CDROM drivers, nothing specific to Plextor. It sounds like your copies may have been corrupted. If you look at what drivers it's using in the properties page of device manager, you can see what files they are. Then check the Windows CD and see if you can locate the compressed version of it in the i386 directory (there'll be 3 or 4 drivers used). The compressed driver files use a _ for the last letter of the file name, for example CDROM.SYS is CDROM.SY_. When you find the files, you can use the command "expand" to decompress them, for example:

expand d:\win2000\i386\cdrom.sy_ c:\temp\cdrom.sys

Just make sure the directory you expand to exists already. I'd use a temporary folder so that you have all the files in one spot, then you can drag them to the correct folder and replace the old drivers. You may need to boot to safe mode to replace the drivers, or remove the drive from device manager and disconnect it before rebooting so Windows doesn't try to load a driver, but deleting the device, copying the files, then checking for new hardware should work okay.

It occurred to me that you may not be able to get the driver list, so here are the ones mine uses:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\cdrom.sys
c:\windows\system32\drivers\imapi.sys
c:\windows\system32\drivers\redbook.sys
c:windows\system32\storprop.dll

They may be located somewhere differently on your system of course.

It's also possible that the drive has simply had some sort of failure.

 

[Coldy]

Weird, I shut down last night work up this morning and everything was fine Weird. But thank you for your advice...if this ever happens again I'll know what to do

 

[Coldy]

Now its freaking out again

It shows the device under the device manager, and it says the device is working properly. But everytime I try to load a CD it says it could not be read because of an I/O error. What could be causing this? I've tried booting in safe mood, even got a blue screen in safe mode once. How can I get any drivers off the windows CD if I cant read CDs?

please help :/

 

[Spikey289]

Is the drive connected to another cd rom on the same cable? Maybe the cable is having trouble. Try a diffrent cable or reseat them.

 

[Coldy]

Ok I tried switching the ribbon cable with a brand new one. Its on its own cable straight to the mobo. I've recently gotten this same Blue Screen error 2 times:

"Driver_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
***Address <hex> base at <hex> DateStamp <hex> - IdeChnDr.sys

Begginning dump of physical memory."

...perhaps its not hardware. Does this give anyone any indication of what the problem might be? Normally I'd boot from the windows 2k cd and try and emergency repair. Not sure what to do in this case. Last time i tried to boot from the cd, it said "Boot from cd..." for about 1 split second then went and jumped into loading from the HD. I even had boot from CD first set in the bios. please help!

 

[Coldy]

Well, I backed up my main hard drive onto another, and tried to boot from my windows 2k cd but instead of the normal "Press any key to boot from cd" it just said "Boot from cd:" for 2 seconds then proceeded to load windows off the hard drive. So I'm assuming that the cdr drive is whats to blame. Its weird though, its lights flash, I can sometimes hear the disc spin up, but if there is a cd in the drive when it starts up or if I try to read a cd after putting one in, I get the blue screen error mentioned above, and sometimes automatic restart.

Guess I'll have to buy a new CDR tomorrow and see if that works. If it doesnt, I dont know how I'd put a new install of windows on...

 

[Coldy]

New drive fixed it.