Wierd CD-ROM fault

[nige]

Here's a good one...

A friend's PC (Athlon 2800XP Windows XP SP2) is having trouble with CD-ROMS, namely Windows refusing to recognise data CDs.

Originally her DVD-RW drive refused to read and write any media at all, the occasional original DVD movie being the only exception. Having given the PC a once-over I couldn't find any problems apart from a semi-installed copy of InCD (the packet writing application of the Nero suite). I removed Nero/InCD and found it made no difference whatsover.

Out of interest I tried the fully-functioning DVD-RW drive from my machine in my friend's PC. In this machine my drive could read DVD movies and audio CDs and recognise blank discs; it would not read Data CDs or burn any data - when trying to burn a disk it went through the motions of burning a CD but didn't actually burn anything to the disc.

Interestingly, when a data CD was in the drive the disk managment section in XP's Admin Tools reported that a disk was present and was a healthy, active partition. However, Explorer itself refused to acknowledge that the disk existed.

Things I have tried:

Checked/unchecked digital audio and DMA support on the drive options
Deactivated/reactivated Windows support for disk burning
Checked for the presence of an ASPI layer
Tried different combinations of Master/slave and different IDE connections for the drive

I'm guessing the knackered Nero installation has killed something in XP. Any ideas as what we can do to sort this one?

[WiteWulf]

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

...

No?

Ah well, seriously...it's probably the drivers for the CDROM filesystems that somehow got stuffed with the abortive InCD installation. Try backing out to a System Restore point in XP. Failing that, it's probably OS reinstall time. I take it you've tried taking the offending drive out and testing it in another machine and that was ok, too?