Without warning my Sony desktop fails to recognize the presence of media in both my Pioneer DVD and ASUS CDROM drives. Windows System reports both drives are worning fine, and Windows Explorer sees both drives. However, I receive the same "Please insert a disk" message when I try to open media. I have tried: 1) disconnecting and reconnecting the IDE cable. 2) blowing compressed air to clean the lens. 3) uninstall/reinstall and deleting the devices 4) reinstalling Windowss SP2 from scratch (after purchasing a USB DVD drive. 5) Installing Windows XP SP3. 6) searching for new device drivers. 7) attempting drive rollback (nothing available). 7) shutting down the ZoneAlarm firewall. 8) Running in Safe mode. 9) uninstalling Nero 8
The recently purchased USB DVD drive uses all the same drivers. and works without problems. Perhaps I need to try a replacement IDE cable?
Gary, thanks for the good advise. I've been trying to correct this problem for so long, that I forgot to mention that I had already tried this. Nevertheless, I started up REGEDIT, and was surprised to see that LowerFilters did contain a value (perhaps as a relsult of installing the USB DVD drive). Anyway, I removed the value. LowerFilters_1 and UpperFilters_1 had no values. There was no registry entry for UpperFilters. Should ther be one? Anyway, I rebooted, but the problem remains.
Did you delete both UpperFilters & LowerFilters and any variation thereof?? Not just change the values ... actually delete them (so there is no UpperFilters or Lowerfilters entry).
Doesn't always resolve this ... but does in more cases than not.
As in the classic text game "Adventure", one of the cave dead-ends has a sign that says "You are at Wit's End". That's exactly where I find myself. The attempted solutions (see my original message). and the one I omitted (deletinh Lower & Upper filters), hvae all ended in failure. I was leaning towards aproblem with my IDE cable, but Windows XP recognizes both devices, reports everything is fine with them, reinstalls when deleted, without problems, etc. When I first insert media in my CDROM, I first see hard disk activity, then a CD icon blinks on my screen 8-10 time, followed (briefly) by the twirling pointer indicating finishing up the process. When I open Windows Explorer, and click on the drive, I get the "Please insert a disk . . ." Retrying this insertion process shows no apparent activity.
In reviewing this thread, I noticed that you have also tried "... reinstalling Windowss SP2 from scratch ..." along with all the other driver resets, etc. While I'm not a big believer in coincidence, it seems that you may have actually had BOTH of your optical drives fail at the same time => OR you simply have a failed IDE cable ... did you ever try replacing that ??
