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Nel · Guest

I'm currently looking at my brother's PC to try to sort this problem out
(he's useless at fixing them!).

It started when he was making coasters out of every disc he burned. When I
checked it, it would read CD's ok, but not DVD's. As his system was clogged
up to the hilt with crap, I decided to re-install XP - hoping this would fix
the DVD drive problem as well as cleaning his system.

After a re-installation of XP (which went fine, so the drive was reading the
CD then), the PC would not read CD's or DVD's at all. Every disc inserted
(data, audio, DVD, DVD-R etc) would struggle for around 30secs to identify
the disc, then open a "Write files to the CD" window!

A couple of days later he told me he had bought a new DVD-RW drive and would
I fit it. After fitting this new drive I was left with exactly the same
problem - no disc would be read correctly. I even tried an old DVD-ROM
without luck. All the jumpers were set correctly and I've tried the drives
on both IDE0 & IDE1.

Today I tried re-installing XP again (well it's worth a try!) but when I set
the BIOS to boot from CD first, it did the 30secs bit then loaded the OS.

This leaves me with the conclusion that something on the motherboard is
knackered! Is it possible/common for part of the motherboard that controls
CD/DVD drives to fail but to leave no other clues? Will a PCI IDE
controller work or would the fault on the motherboard mean that the drives
still won't be read?

If the board is useless now, does anyone have any recommendations for an
cheap alternative as he doesn't want to fork out for a full board/CPU/RAM
combo. He currently has an Athlon 1200+ CPU and 512MB PC2100 184 pin RAM

I'd like to fix the problem for him if possible, but if it were me I'd go
for a full upgrade!! :-)

Any help appreciated