NO boot - Dirty CDROM disk

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Tue Jul 30, 2002 1:00 am

Yes, just a little dirt on the Sim CIty 2000 CDROM loaded in my Pioneer SCSI slot load DVD drive was all it took for Win-XP to freeze on boot. The problem started days ago when the kids complained that the PC was locking up on loading Sim City. This past Sunday a failed Sim City load with lockup progressed to a no boot after power cycling. I was eventually able to restore from previous known working, get Win-XP to boot in safe mode & then do a complete disk check & fix.
I decided to run a long-past-due full defrag of the 60G drive too (20G used). After all this the system would still only boot to the desktop & never load the icons or task bar. FInally, I noticed that every 5-20 seconds a little bit of DVD drive green LED activity flashes! I pop the CDROM out, and the system finished booting - NO Problem!
Clean & polish the disk a little & it now runs fine.
Win-XP blows when it comes to how many little things can totally kill it!!

Post by **Derek** » Tue Jul 30, 2002 10:30 am

At what point during the boot sequence would it freeze?

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Tue Jul 30, 2002 2:10 pm

The last time it froze with just the desktop background loaded - no icons or taskbar. After several minutes I pulled the dirty CDROM and the boot finished immediately. Previous faild boots stopped with black screen with KB & mouse not initialized.

Post by **Derek** » Tue Jul 30, 2002 4:03 pm

XP doesn't seem to like some CD/DVD ROMs... Twice I've had to reformat because they just disappear.

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Tue Jul 30, 2002 4:12 pm

I've got a Kenwood 52X ATAPI CDROM drive that uses the Zen technology of (7) laser beams to get high data rate with low RPM. It also disappears regularly from XP setup on one of my (3) BP6 systems. Always comes back though & works great when its there.

Post by **Derek** » Tue Jul 30, 2002 8:51 pm

I love that drive.

About the disappearing: How are your devices recognized in the BIOS and what controllers are they on?

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Sat Aug 03, 2002 1:50 pm

The Kenwood shares the Primary ATA33 channel with my LS120 ultra floppy boot drive as the master. I love the LS120 too - talk about fast floppy booting! Nice to be able to do a floppy boot with 120MB available for whatever tools may be needed. Now that I'm aware of just how BRITTLE the WinXP O/S is - I'm working on building a special LS120 boot disk for WinXP that check & resolve disk errors preventing Hdisk boot up.