Hi folks, I have a really strange problem with windows 95 and my read access on removable disk drives including CDROM, CDWRITER, ZIP drive and even my floppy drive. To make it short: I have definitly NO read access to all the above mentioned drives anymore. It just came over my system. My system is a Windows 95 version 4.00.950a with a lot of regular Microsoft updates to more recent version of the OS. The CD ROM drives are SCSI ones with an Adaptec SCSI 7880 UW Controller, the ZIP is a parallel port one and the floppy ... guess what. What happened: It was time for cleaning up my system on a regular basis. Deinstalling unecessary software and defragmenting the hardrive. After this procedure the 'no read access' problem occured. If I try to read a CDROM in either of my two drives, the Explorer and the Windows Commander is telling me that the disk is a blank disk! The same happens to my ZIP disks. The funny thing is, that my CD writer software has NO problems reading and writing CD ROM's. You can read in a multisession CD, add some files and write it, no problem. The problem appeared first only with the CDROM drives, so I checked them with a emergency 95 system on a second harddrive with the same hardware and the result was, that both drives are working perfectly ok. I checked my system for viruses, no result. I disabled my virus scan. No results. I also reinstalled the drivers for the SCSI controller and for the ZIP drive. No results. I removed all drives from device manager, no results. Just recently the problem spread out to my floppy disk. This drive remembered the last disk data (size and left over space) and does not show the contents anymore. It also brings up a file system error 163. If I boot in Safe Mode, the floppy works, but my CDROM drives and my ZIP drive are not seen from the Explorer. Although they appear in the device manager. but this seems to be okay because there are no drivers loaded. My config.sys and my autoexec.bat are completely empty, so there are no funny drivers loaded too. I'm stucked and have no idea what happened and how to fix this all. If anyone could help me, I would be very very thankfull. Moose

I suspect the registry is bad. (Since you say drives are fine with your back-up W95). Delete the registry by going into properties and unchecking hidden, system, and read only -- then right click delete (will put them in trash bin for recovery, if needed). Then copy and paste the registry from your back-up and paste them into your current windows directory. (Registry is system.dat and user.dat). If you kept your back-up version up-to date, this should work out.

Re techtony's response. Yep I like the idea of restoring registry. However, I could be quite wrong but this is how I thought things went on W95: 1. Windows will not let you delete registry because it is in use, so you have to unset the r h s attribs in DOS and copy the new registry into c:\windows from there too. No big hassle. 2. Fine if you have kept your own last good copies of system.dat and user.dat otherwise you will need to rename "system.da0 and user.da0" to "system.dat and user.dat" then copy these to on top (from DOS) 3. If the system booted up OK despite your problems then system.da0 and user.da0 will have already been overwritten (ie registry assumed to be OK by sytem). Just hope I'm wrong otherwise what I am saying is that unless you kept your own copies of the .dat files (as I used to) it is now too late to replace registry - easy on W98 because it keeps more than one copy.

Hi folks, thanks for your answers so far. You're right in using a good backup copy of the registry. Unfortunatley there is no good copy. As far as I understand from your answers, no one knows what went wrong with the registry. My hope is that there may be one 95 insider who knows about the special key that could have changed in this crazy way. Anyone out there? Thanks Moose