I'm trying to sort out a PC for a mates daughter who'd never bothered with any win updates. I think I've finally got rid of all the viruses /spyware/adware and I have it fully patched but it still has problems reading CD's or USB mem sticks. It has a DVD writer and a CDRW installed on the secondary IDE channel and a single HD on the primary. It will boot off a CD so it's not a hardware issue. The problem is identical to the one described here http://www.mcse.ms/message1808781.html and here's some more http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/12956.html http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/38476.html It will occasionally read CD's if it's booted with them in the drives. I've tried everything suggested in these and other posts, everything I could find in the MS KB, and everything google turned up. Unfortunately I didn't make a list. I knew I should of just reinstalled it in the first place, but after all the work I've put into it to get it this far I don't really want to give up and reinstall now. Anyone got any ideas ? Cheers Totty

Reagrding the CD Device issue you are having these are some of my ideas: In my experience this symptom of an "unresponsive but alive CD device" as I would like to call that state, occurs because of Windows Registry corruption.This damage might be caused during Viral/spyware infection or following treatment for them that might have involved numerous troubleshoots. One fix for the problem is to perform a Registry troubleshoot which often succeeds in most cases. This is how: 1.Click Start>Run 2.In Open: type REGEDIT and then press [ENTER] key to open Registry Editor. 3. Open the Hives and keys sequentailly to get here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} 4. After clicking to highlight the key {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} , from the Regedit Menu bar click on File>Export ...and save the backed up key with a file name of your choice on the desktop as an insuarnce against any Registry editing mishaps.Should the troubleshoot fails, you can always retore the registry to Pre-edit state by just clicking on the exported file so it will merge with registry and restore it to previous state. 5. Return to the Registry editor and the highlighted key {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} , and then locate from the RIGHT panel the Value UpperFilters and click to highlight that and then click from menu bar Edit>Delete>OK 6. Similarly locate LowerFilters and peform same steps as above to Edit>Delete>OK See if this will restore your CD-DVD Drive problems M

Thanks for the reply and detailed instructions maadhurimn but thats one of the things I've already tried. Cheers Allan

Have you uninstalled and reinstalled Third Party Burning Programs if any? M

No, it has nero installed, I'll try removing it. I've just checked device manager and I now have 2 unknown devices that wern't there when I started. Although both the drives show up ok and so does the IDE controller so they may not be related. I'll have to try and ID them.

Update. I removed nero and then decided to remove all drive related software. It crashed while removing some DVD related software (can't remember what it was called). After that it wouldn't boot, booting from xp,98 and 2k CDs all no longer recognised the partition. Fdisk from the w98 CD just locked up on the verifying disk screen. I suspected hardware failure at this point but decided to try some Linux live CDs. MEPS didn't recognise the mouse correctly so it stayed still and occasionally clicked, that’s the first time MEPIS has failed me, it's my main OS on my laptop. Damn Small Linux booted fine and I used cfdisk to recreate the partition table. On reinstalling XP now.