System reboots when CD inserted or removed.

[Horney_Senior]

My nephew brought his PC over for me to look at with an unusual problem.

His primary hard drive had crashed, so he took the system to Futureshop (mistake 1) where they put in a new drive (Seagate Baracuda 320 GB) and re-installed Windows. Since that time, whenever he inserts or removed a CD/DVD the system re-boots. The CD/DVD drive is a new LG burner.

I formatted the new drive and installed windows again. Same problem. Trying to determine if it was the system or the burner, I replaced the DVD drive with an older Panasonic. It worked fine, so we incorrectly made the assumption that the DVD drive was flakey and put in a new one (The newer LG GSA-H55L). It does the re-boot.

We tried the DVD drive in an older machine (which has an identical windows installation) and it works fine.

Thinking now that there could be a compatibility problem between LG and the Seagate drive, I removed the HD and installed windows on the second original drive (Western Digital 250GB) while removing the Seagate completely from the system. The reboot continues to happen.

So, does anybody have an experience with this type of problem or potential items to check?

HELP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[thirdtime]

Check the jumper settings on both drives.
If they're both on the Primary IDE channel (ribbon cable) The HD should be 'Master' and the burner 'Slave'.
If the burner is on it's own ribbon cable, it should be set to 'Master'

 

[Horney_Senior]

The DVD drive is one the IDE channel. Tried both master and cable select. No other device on that channel.

Hard drive is SATA with the boot drive on SATA 0. To repeat the point, I've tried the installation with the new drive in and the new drive out with no better results. Chipset is up-to-date. Also, the BIOS is current. I can tell from the date it was issued that FS must have flashed it. I wonder if that's the problem.

 

[Radio_Shack]

I know symptoms don't point directly to this but:

Sounds like a power supply issue or overheating maybe, try swapping power
supply to see if that fixes the problem. What is the power supply rating?

being that it worked before is strange though.....

 

[thirdtime]

Is the DVD on the Primary or Secondary IDE channel?
What's the make\model of motherboard?
Have you checked the BIOS settings?

If FS flashed the BIOS without your approval, I'd tear a strip off them and have them fix it. They may possibly try to flash it back to a previous version, but I'd let them do it. A bad flash can render the motherboard unusable.

 

[Horney_Senior]

Is the DVD on the Primary or Secondary IDE channel?
What's the make\model of motherboard?
Have you checked the BIOS settings?

If FS flashed the BIOS without your approval, I'd tear a strip off them and have them fix it. They may possibly try to flash it back to a previous version, but I'd let them do it. A bad flash can render the motherboard unusable.

This machine has only a primary IDE and 4SATA ports. The MB is an Intel D945GTP.

BIOS is correct.

The system also works with DVD drives that are not LG.

 

[thirdtime]

Stupid question, but I have to ask it:
Were the latest available motherboard drivers installed after the installation of XP?

 

[Horney_Senior]

Stupid question, but I have to ask it:
Were the latest available motherboard drivers installed after the installation of XP?

Yup!!

 

[Rigel7]

Have you installed the latest service Pack for the OS?

If that doesn't fix it, check your Bios settings for the DVD drive. There is probably LG support you can check with.

 

[cypherpunk]

Assuming you've ruled out software issues, I see two possible problems.

1) The firmware on the DVD drive is bad, which I find unlikely given the severity of the problem. Firmware is upgradeable, though there's a slight risk associated with flashing firmware.

2) The motor that controls the DVD tray is sucking down way too much power or there's some other electrical problem. Plugging in the power and not the IDE cable should let you test this theory.

I strongly doubt that there's something specific about LG drives that breaks compatibility. If you haven't ruled out software issues, you can do so with a lightweight Linux live OS.

 

[Horney_Senior]

Have you installed the latest service Pack for the OS?

If that doesn't fix it, check your Bios settings for the DVD drive. There is probably LG support you can check with.

Several people mentioned flashing the BIOS and it had been done. It turned out the problem was in one of the settings. The disk drive settings were set to 'enhanced' which is used for installing RAID. When I changed it back to 'legacy' the DVD drive started behaving normally.

What bothers me the most about this is that Future Shop had 'fixed' the machine but apparently only checked to see that everything was installed, not that it actually worked.

Thanks everybody for all your assistance.

HS

 

[thirdtime]

You said you checked the BIOS settings and they were correct?

Regardless, what fixed it makes no sense and has nothing to do with RAID.
In the motherboard manual under the BIOS ATA/IDE Configuration
Legacy enables up to two IDE channels for OS requiring legacy IDE operation.
Enhanced (or Native) enables all SATA and PATA
resources.

Enhanced is default and should have worked for the IDE burner and the 2 SATA hard drives. XP isn't a legacy OS.

RAID configuration is under "Configure SATA as…" which should be set to 'IDE'.