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

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.

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.