Well..to make a long story short..all my hard drives STOPPED functioning i was about to pay for them to get recovered when someone suggested it was the PSU. Installed a new PSU now alll but one of the drives are fine (dead DUE to other reasons).

[Well now all that is resolved.]

The dead drive had windows, so i had to reinstall onto a new drive i brought. I consider myself pretty decent with computers and every time ive reformatted same process..install windows..pop in motherboard driver cd..install drivers.


I can see the DVD drive in hardware devices and my computer but as soon as i pop in a disk it doesnt CHANGE..like the icon..and when i do click the icon representing the dvd drive, every single time explorer crashes. (making me unable to access cd's & dvds) I've been RUNNING a linux live CD off the drive for a several weeks off and on..so i know its not the actual drive hardware. I was also able to install XP home using the drive so that cant be the problem..

I tried installing FIRMWARE..to no avail.

Any ideas?

Drive is 111D Pioneer and motherboard is 965p DS3 Gigabyte (Rev 1.0)One of these may help:
1. Uninstall the drive through Device Manager.
Restart computer. The drive will be automatically reinstalled.
or...
2. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060
Restart computer.
or...
3. Download, and run Restore Missing CD Drive patch
Double click on cdgone.zip to unzip it.
Right click on cdgone.reg, click Merge.
Accept registry merge.
Restart computer.
or...
4. Go to Device Manager, click a "+" sign next to IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers.
You'll see two items:
- ATA Channel0 (or Primary Channel)
- ATA Channel1 (or Secondary Channel)
Right click on each of them, and click Uninstall. Confirm.
Restart Windows. They'll be automatically reinstalled.None of the above steps resolved the problems.

Cheers, Kingpomba.Bad drive, I assume.Really?

I was able to install windows XP using it fine just a day ago and same goes for using it for a week long with a linux CD.

This may be because the DVD laser is shot while the CD laser is fine...
Vista is on a DVD.

New dual-layer DVD burners are $40 Bucks shipped from newegg.Nah the live CD im talking about was actually a *live DVD* so it cant be that.
HmmmDrives can go suddenly. I have before had a perfectly good drive one day and a virtually useless one the next. Actually on serveral occasions come to think of it. Quote from: kingpomba on March 30, 2009, 12:22:10 AM

Nah the live CD im talking about was actually a *live DVD* so it cant be that.
Hmmm

never heard of a linux live DVD. which distro?