DVD, CD-RW & Jazz drives quit reading

ABIT NF7-M (NFORCE2 motherboard) BIOS 19
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 1 Build 2600
Maxtor 80 gig HD ATA/133 (80 pin cable)
ATAPI CD-RW 48X24 (40 pin cable) new
IDE DVD-ROM 16X " " " new
Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI Host Adapter
Iomega Jazz (1 gig SCSI)
Acer ScanWit 2720S (SCSI Film Scanner)
Acer 610S (SCSI Flatbed Scanner)


The CD R/W (ATAPI), DVD drive (IDE) and Iomega Jazz (SCSI) only allow READ access when media is in drives during bootup. If drives are empty before powerup they are recognized in Explorer but wont read. The CD-RW can be written to only using XP's native write, even when the disk can't be read. Leave a disk in prior to boot and it displays. The SCSI scanners always work normally. For what it's worth it appears that only the drives with removable media are the culprits. Built this machine a month ago and all was working well then. The only changes made since everything worked was the usual Window's updates.

Changed the NVIDIA IDE drivers to Microsoft's but that didn't help. Originally had Adaptec's 4.72 ASPI layer and changed that to the 4.6 rev since I heard that was more stable even with XP. Cabling is conventional, i.e., the R/W is on the cable end jumpered as master of the secondary IDE channel. The hard drive is the only device on the primary as master. Tried one CD Rom drive on secondary, no help. The Device Manager shows all devices as normal with no yellow exclamation points. Incidentally, these combinations of SCSI and IDE play well on Windows 98. I remember using EZSCSI there. Not sure of how picky XP is with SCSI ASPI layers and if this is part of the problem, but ASPI seems to be the only thing common to SCSI and IDE. If so how is it corrected or is there an inherent bug? Using CD Maker 6 Platinum for the R/W and that did work initially. Fortunately there is the work-a round of letting media in the drives prior to powering up but getting around that would be great. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Stu, same prob here I think. Did you find a fix?

Windows sees drives and assigns letters.

Windows complains that media may be corrupt or wants to
format media.

Same media (CDR disks and Zip250s) read fine in other machines.
Same drives (CDRW, CD, Zip250) can read fine when installed in other machines.

Using WinXP Pro, Easy CD 5 Plat.Ed. Tried Nero 6 and CDIWin but have uninstalled since.

Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks

I didn’t pursue the issue any farther and just leave Cd’s inserted in the drives. It still is an aggravation. I don’t see the, “Windows complains that media may be corrupt or wants to format media” remarks. I guess I’m hoping it’s an XP issue that will be resolved in SP2 . There are a lot of people out there with the same problem. One solution may be to restore to an earlier date but what’s to say the same thing wont re-occur. If I do find a solution I’ll post it here.

Stu