CDROM crashing Win98

Stephen

Well, I just reformatted my hard drive today. I reinstalled win98. Everything was working fine, until I tried to copy stuff from CDs. Unreal Tournament, for instance - the the whole system freezes while its copying it's files. The same thing happens when manually copying files through win explorer. This happens with both my CDROM and CDRW drives. Anyone have any idea wtf is going on and how I can fix it?

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- Munch
- Visit The Fortress

WhiteWashMan

hmmm, try uninstalling both drives and then rebooting/ should auto reinstall both drives
if it doesnt work
reinstall windows again and this time fdisk your hard drive

SantaHoe

Good job WWM.
Don't forget to do an "FDISK /MBR" while you're at it
Oooh, I love that part!

_CreeD_

Check for DOS Cd-Rom drivers loading up in the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat (Did you leave them there after reinstalling?). Then remove em, hell rename both files just to be safe.

Disable Direct-CD or any packet writing software you have runnig in the background. Try uninstalling your CDRW software completely, sometimes they screw up the whole file system. You night even want to reinstall Win98 over itself just to be sure.

Make sure nothing is sharing IRQ15.

Other than that you could make sure the proper Busmaster driver for your MBD is installed.
Disable any CD-Rom cache software you might have installed.
Turn down the read-ahead- optimisation etc.

Check the drive in DOS (Okay, I know I said remove dos drivers but by now we're grasping at straws), if it still happens then double check the drive jumpering (Longshot I know....).


[This message has been edited by _CreeD_ (edited 09-02-2000).]

Excelsior

All these suggestions here are fine and all, BUT, I've seen this problem before.
You see, a percentage of unreal tournament cds are in fact infencted with the semen of the devil. Yes, that is right, they are pure evil. win98, and its patented WinDemonwatch is picking this up, and spewing it out, out, out.
unfortunately the only solution to your terrible problem involves finding a priest called Fr Andrew Grove. Last time I heard he was somewhere in Egypt, digging up ominous archeology sites. or you could play Quake 3. (which gives you plenary indulgence)

WhiteWashMan

what a load of crap.
hes in sudan, not egypt

Stephen

Well I've dug out an old floppy disk with "VIA IDE BusMaster Drivers" on it and installed 'em. It says I'll need to reboot before they take effect, so I'll find out if it works later, since I can't be @rsed now

For those who are interested, the motherboard is a manky VXPro job, using simm ram.

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- Munch
- Visit The Fortress

Gerry

The VIA busmaster drivers require a mixture of voodoo and witchcraft to work. Just ask the anarchist. He spent months trying to get DMA enabled for his DVD and after many efforts it just worked, almost inexplicably. So good luck!

shank

I'd a similar prob with a dvd drive of mine on a chaintech mobo via chipset, the VIA IDE BusMaster Drivers sorted it in 2 mins.

_CreeD_

ONe last thing........You could disable DMA in the Cd-ROm properties of device-manager. It'll slow things down a little (It'll use more CPU time for data transfers, But I think I remember a few people on some tech forums saying that it helped.....). Why doesn't anything Microsoft related ever just WORK?...........

The Anarchist

Yes thats right steve I had UDMA up to my tonsils for a while there. Your best bet is to go to the Chaintech site I presume thats your board but if its not there is a link on this site to download 4-in-one drivers for VIA chipsets. I found that these drivers sorted my UDMA problem. Alternativley you should just disable the UDMA through Device Manager.

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Ehhhhhh if its broke then fix it......... or **** it!

Stephen

Yeah i found the 4-in-1 drivers at http://www.via.com.tw (Though disabling DMA on both drives seems to have done the trick).

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- Munch
- Visit The Fortress

The Anarchist

Glad to be of help!!!

Hobbes

Also another thing to try is if you have a fast CDROM Drive go into the Drive settings (right click My computer and select properties. Its on the last tab to the right).

Switch off all read ahead and cacheing on the CD-ROM drive.

amp

Sometimes virii can hook in to the interrupt that cd-roms use.

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Play GLminesweeper! Lunacy Abounds!