Hi Experts,
i have two PC's in my house, i decided to upgrade both system to a wrieless keyboard and mouse, i bought the same set up for both systems (running XP Pro) System number one installed fine, when i moved to system number 2 the installation CD would not start, so i tried hitting the START, RUN, BROWSE to find the auto run option, click on that...no good, still nothing, tried the other disk that came with the keyboard and mouse from the first system, keep in mind they are identical so either disk would work....still no good. At this point i wanted to try any cd, so i grabbed the first one i could find which was paintshop pro....this worked fine, so my question is should the drive need to be replaced? can a bad drive read some disks and not others? thanks in advance
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If autorun works on other CD's in that drive, but not the one in question, I don't think your CD drive is totally bad. You might try just running a CD cleaner in it and see if that clears it up. Clicking on autorun.inf may not work, but you can open it in notepad and see what file autorun is supposed to open, then you can browse to that file and start from there.
You might also try to repair the CD autorun feature. Try this: http://www.kellys-korner-x
>>can a bad drive read some disks and not others<<
YES.
<< can a GOOD drive read some disks and not others >>
YES.
It depends on the drive and the media involved.
First DVD and CD functions used different lasers.
The different functions ROM(read only) vs R(writeable) vs RW(rewriteable) used different intensities of those lasers.
One laser can go bad and not the other.
Or, for either laser, one intensity can go bad not the others.
Not all media is created equal and neither are all drives.
Occasionally you will find a given media that simply doesn't work in a particular drive.
I would not replace a thing unless this drive starts having problems with media repeatedly.
.
nobus: read the original post. He said he already tried the other CD. It didn't work either, but he was able to run other CD's in that drive.
rralph: did you get your wireless keyboard & mouse installed on the system in question? If you haven't yet, you could share the CD drive from the known good machine and run the install from that, OR go to the manufacturer's site and download the installation files from there. Beyond that, if this is the only CD you experience problems with on that machine, I probably wouldn't change the drive unless you need an excuse to get a new or better one.
Did you try right-clicking on the cd drive and going to explore..., then navigating to the setup executable on the cd?
Driver cds are sometimes finnicky, and you have to do workarounds like this. I'd say your drive is probably fine, and if you can run the executable manually, then just consider this a fluke.
Eric
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by: onsitezPosted on 2007-01-07 at 14:18:15ID: 18263381
put your xp oem or retail cd in the cd drive , reboot , set your bios to boot from the cd drive
see if the pc boots the xp cd
of course do not let it go and reinstall xp