2 Problems: Lock-Up's and Disk Drive Not Being Detected

1. My computer is freezing regularily now. The odd part? It never freezes while i'm using it, but only at night when I leave it on.... I go on in the morning and by that time it is long frozen.

2. My disk drives are no longer being detected. Both my internel CD and DVD drives just fail to show up anywhere... Device Manager or My Computer... this just happened now and randomly and I have no clue why... any help would be appreciated!

 

Hello brad,

You have a background process that's doing this or the Screen Saver is doing this. If you're using one of XP's screen savers, try no screen saver. If a 3rd party screen saver, disable it and see.

Go into Device Manager and uninstall the ROM drives, re boot, XP will re detect the drivers and the hardware.

Regards - Charles

 

Alright, I was using a third party screensaver, it was an older version of After Dark, so that was probably why it was freezing...

In regards to the second part, could you tell me exactly how to do this?

Thanks,

Brad.

 

Hi brad,

In DM, expand the ROM devices line - click the + sign. Right click on each device > Uninstall > re boot. This is a basic first step. If this doesn't solve the problem, then more digging.

Regards - Charles

 

Ah, well.... here's the problem... there is no ROM section in DM for me to expand...

 

Right click My Computer > Manage > Disk management.

See if they show up here. If so, do the two ROM devices have drive letters? If not, assign them. Right click on them in the upper section of the window > "Change Drive Letter and paths.... ".

Regards - Charles

 

They do not show up there at all, only my 2 harddrives. As a curiosity, I plugged in my USB External DVD Burner and it picked it up, assigned it a letter and is working fine... but the two internal drives are non-existant to my computer for whatever reason...

 

Thanks for everyones help, but it was [of course] something horendously stupid. I had cleaned my case out the other day (using my air compressor) and it knocked out the cable that connects my drives (the CDRW piggy backs off of the DVD) after pushing that in a bit, they were both detected again.

Back to my original problem (sorta) my PC seems to lock up while i'm away... I'll leave it doing something (in the most recent case converting and burning a video disk) and when I came back to check on it, it had locked up half way through. Naturally this is horribly frustrating, and I'd like to know why it locks up when I leave it running one or two programs, doing menial tasks while i'm away, and not while i'm pushing it when i'm actively using it.

Any help would of course be very much appreciated

Regards,

Brad.

 

LOL, should have thought of that - to paraphrase Steve, never overlook the obvious.

In my original post, I wrote that it may be a background process. I don't think there is any other way other than to slog thru and disable them one by one to narrow it down.

Have you looked in the Event Viewer?

Right click on My Computer, then Manage.
On the left you will see Event Viewer. Expand that (click on the plus sign).

Then click on System. See if there are any errors being logged by the system when the problem occurs.

Right clicking on a line and then clicking on Properties will give you a window with more info concerning that line. You'll see in the top section right below the down arrow, a text graphic symbol. Clicking on that will place the error info text into your clipboard (memory). Bring up Notepad and right click and paste, that will transfer it to Notepad. You can then paste the text into your next post here.

Regards - Charles

 

The device, \Device\CdRom2, has a bad block. There's one... this is repeated about 20 times in a row, and then another 15 or so in between others... As well: The device, \Device\CdRom4, has a bad block.

The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort1, did not respond within the timeout period.
As well... there are about 100 of those in a row...

The server {F3A614DC-ABE0-11D2-A441-00C04F795683} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.

I'll edit it the next time it freezes, but thankfully it hasen't done so yet today. There was a few .Net problems when I looked in the application section, but it was mostly application hangs. I'll see what happens next lock up... for now can someone tell me what any of these mean?

 

Hi Brad,

Ok, in my searching on this, these two links are representative of this kind of error:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1019055300

http://forums.techguy.org/windows-n...rashes.html?c7f57cadb4856f9b1018d1fbe8d44be2=

Multiple causes and you're going to have to track each posssibility down, but It seems to be some hardware issue with either the HD or the ROM or the way they are hooked up.

Test your HD. You can run chkdsk first and see what it comes up with: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/chkdsk.mspx Don't use any switch settings for now - just let it report.

Also you can run the HD OEM's diagnostic: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

And while you're at it, test the RAM: http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

And in the interest in not overlooking the obvious, you don't have a cd/dvd in the drive you've forgotten about have you?

Regards - Charles