Thread: Why does Windows XP cease to recognize the CD drive after I work it to death?

  1. #1
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    Why does Windows XP cease to recognize the CD drive after I work it to death?

    Can anyone please advise me:

    I am writing a program to recover bad sectors on optical discs (CDs, and DVDs). I use the APSI interface. I set ASPI timeouts to a small number (4), using SC_GETSET_TIMEOUTS (ASPI Command 0x08), and then I read through all the sectors, good and bad, sequentially. The read operations on the bad sectors time out quickly. If there are a very lot of bad sectors, there are a very lot of timeouts, and this is when I encounter the problem.

    The symptom is that the CD drive becomes not only completely inaccessible, but ceases to even appear in the “My Computer” virtual folder. The only way I found to make the drive accessible again is to reboot.

    I would like to 1) avoid causing this problem; and 2) be able to recover from it programmatically.

    Any comments would be helpful. Thanks!

    Mike

  2. #2
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    More info...

    A little more info...

    The hardware is an HP pavillion notebook computer.

    Computer Management's Event view (system events) logged an event with these properties:


    The device 'HL-DT-ST DVD+RW GCA-4040N' (IDE\CdRomHL-DT-ST_DVD+RW_GCA-4040N_______________1.17____\5&10d651e0&0&0.0.0) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

    For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

  3. #3
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    I'd say that after timing out on bad sectors the drive may be waiting for some sort of ASPI command to reset it, I dunno, I have no experience in that area. But I have noticed that after some bad read ops drives do become unresponsive, so try getting some finished software that does a similar task and try to work out how it handles it.

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