Hi,
My laptop (650MHZ P III) is having a problem booting XP
with a DVD-CDRW combo drive (QSI brand) in place. The
laptop hangs when XP logo is displayed (The bar below
the logo with boxes in it stops scrolling). Without any
drive in the bay or with my old Toshiba DVD-ROM drive
in place XP boots fine. I can boot in safe mode though
with the QSI drive, and XP shows the QSI drive correctly
and reads CDs fine in the safe mode. The QSI drive
works fine if I put it in in my wife's laptop which is
a 450MHZ laptop with XP installed as well. So it cannot
be a problem of the QSI drive.

But first let me provide some background info. When I
had the Toshiba drive, I had Windows 98 in my laptop. I
installed XP in my laptop with the Toshiba DVD-ROM.
After installing XP I took out Toshiba drive and put in
the QSI combo drive. Windows XP correctly recognized my
new drive and all was well. At this point I updated the
bios. Then I decided to reinstall XP to fix some audio
driver problem. For some reason, the installation didn't
go smoothly with the new QSI drive. So I put back the
tested Toshiba drive and reinstalled XP with the Toshiba
drive in place. XP installed fine and the audio problem
was fixed. But this time when I replaced the Tosbiba
drive with QSI again, XP would not boot and hangs in
the logo screen as descibed at the top. I checked the
new bios but could not see any setting that might cause
this. Hope someone can help me fix this problem. I
would very much appreciate it.

Thanks

HI,

One more thing you might want to try is check and make sure the power cable from the powersupply is connected to the back of the hard drive.

Veets

Sorry about the post! I replied to someone else's question, and somehow posted the reply to your question. Please ignore my previous post. Sorry for the inconveneince!

Veets

You may be able to try a few more of the settings in the bios....

1. Try to disable legacy USB

2 try to see if system cache is on and disable it.. and or try to enable it if it isn't

3. try to find a setting named memory hole and disable it,,,

4. ,Is your AGP... or video settings set to the correct size,,, for memory... IE: 32,64 mb. ect.ect.

there may be an IRQ resource conflict of some sort that is keeping the drive from functioning.... or some other setting or power problem... Don't know of any other things right off hand ,,,, Hope you find your problem... I have had success with desktops and doing this... for some reason or other... Other times ,I have had to do the low level format ,,,, (writing zeros to drive, ) which took HOURS>>>> then reinstall.. only to find that it didn't work again , and another time or two... (after cleaning the cd ) everything ended up working from some setting or other

However,from what you describe that is what it seems to be,, Have you updated the bios??

Well In any case thought I might offer some Help and or insight into Helping you with your problem... Perhaps someone else may have some other Ideas... Hope all goes well for you .... I will be looking here again to see if you have been able to resolve your Problem,,, Good Luck , Huh!!!

Hi Quacked,
Thanks for the suggestions. I could not find
any of the settings you listed in my bios. My
laptop has Phoenix Bios version 4 realease 6,
10em. Most of the settings are sane as those in my wife's laptop in which the QSI drive works.

In the last part of your response you
mentioned hard drive (writing zeroes). My issue is not with HD. As I said XP boots fine with no DVD/CD drive or with any drive except
the QSI DVD-CDRW drive. But then the QSI drive works fine in the other laptop. I have
no clue whats going on here. Thanks anyway.

When you say you reinstalled XP, what does that mean? Did you run a repair by booting to cd, or did you delete the partiton create a new one and install fresh XP to hard drive? If the answer is not one of those two, therein lies the problem.
Does bios recognize the Qsi drive?

I deleted the partition, created a new one and
installed XP fresh, just as I did the forst time around when the QSI drive worked. Nothng changed the secoind time around except the bios. Nothing much changed in the new bios that may be related to this problem. I did try to tweak around the settings to no effect. The bios does recognizes the QSI drive as XP does recognize it in safe mode. Am I right?
Thanks

Wow that is strange as you did all the right things...one more shot, take the cables off cdrom and be certain that there are no bent pins on cdrom, that absolutely has to be the problem...and if so depends when that happened, but the other thing I would do is return the bios to original. I have seen bios update whack out hardware more often then not, and it usually incolved cdrom's and cdrw's, whether or not you see the difference.
Oh and it might be in here as this post is getting long, but did you reinstall motherboard drivers?

It cannot be a hardwire problem like bent pins
because as I said earlier it works in the other laptop. I will try to reload the previous bios,although that is a pain as my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive and I have to go through the route of burning ISO image to a CD. Thanks for the
tips.

I have the same exact issue, the only difference is that im running a udja720, on an ibm thinkpad 600 (300mhz, 30gig, 228ram)
this is definately an XP issue, and not a hardware or bios issue. i can get mine to recognize the drive intermittanly, and it works fine, until i reboot ..win xp does not save the proper drivers and reload them upon rebott..its driving me nuts as well..ive had to remove my nice dvd/cdrw and put back the standard cd rom..i hope some one has a fix for this, its very frustrating...