Need Help With Xp

[spirittoo]

My friend has windows xp home edition. He says when it boots up it tries to read the cd drive yet there is nothing there and it keeps trying reading it, then locks up.

My friend says his activtities are limited. No matter what he does it locks up.

He ran AVG, ad-aware and spybot and found nothing.

Could it be a driver issue? Could the cd rom be going bad? I don't know the whole situation so if you need more information let me know and I will contact my friend and post the information.

[Pierce]

Try unplugging the cables from the cd rom, and boot, if it helps then then try a different cd rom drive, otherwise it could be some corrupted asp drivers or something.

Pierce

[spirittoo]

Try unplugging the cables from the cd rom, and boot, if it helps then then try a different cd rom drive, otherwise it could be some corrupted asp drivers or something.

Pierce

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

My friend isn't comfortable with opening the computer that is something I would do and I live over an hour away and don't know when I will come into town.

[JDoors]

I would enter the BIOS and turn off the option to "boot from CD." This won't cure any CD problems (drivers, cables, etc.) but at least he'd be able to finish booting up and could work on the problem from there.

If it actually does finish booting THEN tries to read the CD there is a program loading or a shortcut that points to the CD. One way this can happen is if you install a program from a CD and have the shortcut point to the CD instead of a folder on the hard drive, every time the program tries to load it looks for a CD.

Boot to Safe Mode, check the Start/Programs/Startup menu for programs (remove, at least temporarily, anything there). Run MSCONFIG.EXE and temporarily remove all programs not necessary to keep your system running.

Reboot to normal mode and see if it does it. If not, go back to safe mode and run all the scans you can, something's looking for a CD and it could be malware (though I don't know of any that would do that).

If it does work you'll need to narrow down which program is the problem and use Control Panel/Add/Remove programs to correctly remove it as MSCONFIG does nothing but stop the program from loading, it doesn't do anything to uninstall it.

Edited September 24, 2005 by JDoors

[Pete_C]

I agree, the first step is to enter bios setup and change the boot order to not include the cdrom.

I would make the IDE 0 / primary hard drive the only boot option .

How to configure your bios

Once in XP, try going to control panel/ hardware/ device manager and locate the cdrom / select properties and disable in this profile.

(or boot to safe mode) see if this solves the problem.

I really think that your friend will wind up opening the computer or taking it to a shop. It sounds like there is a power problem and he will wind up replacing the power supply or possibly the cdrom. Disconnnecting the cdrom would let us know if it was a short in the cdrom as the likely culprit or a weak / unstable power supply.

[spirittoo]

Yes I'm begining to suspect it's a hardware problem. That is usually the reason xp will lock up.

He says at times the autoplay icon will pop up looking for a cd to play.

I forget how to you get xp to go to the bios? I though it was the delete key, but it's not. I think I can talk him through that.

I will end up telling them of a friend in their area to call for help or go there myself to check it out.

Thanks