Ghost CD with drive empty

My system sometimes perceives a ghost CD (nothing in the drive) and hangs. A couple of months ago, this used to occur regularly during boot, until I found the only way to make it boot normally was to open the empty CD drive first. This happened early on, before getting as far as the Windows splash screen and selecting the account to use, so it wasn't a rogue app. (I had of course checked: the option "Boot from CD" is present in the BIOS, but was not selected, even as second or third boot option.) Then one day I forgot to open the drive before booting, and discoverd the problem had somehow resolved itself. It hasn't come back in this form - yet.

Now however, last week a couple of times some perfectly normal task seemed to be taking longer than normal, and I spotted the little "revolving CD" icon blinking next to the hourglass cursor. When I checked the tower, which is normally out of sight under the desk, I saw that, yes, the CD drive was trying to read something that wasn't there. And I couldn't open the drive nomally - had to stuck a pin into the little "reset" hole.

It's not the end of the world; now that I'm again aware of it, I can find a way around it when it happens. But it bugs the heck out of me and I'd be interested in any suggestions on how to stop it reoccuring.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

 

Morning, Pete - you're up early on a Sunday I was up to see Valentino Rossi in the MotoGP in Malaysia...

Thank you, yes, I was considering this too, except that the drive works perfectly well when I use it normally. I'll try disabling it as you suggest, until I need it, which isn't often.

But that'll still leave me curious as to whether there was something else going on as well.

Geoffrey