I can't stand these CDROM problems

Okay, I'm still having problems with my CD drive. It's actually a DVD drive but I don't think it has anything to do with that.

Here's the short of it. I can't seem to run a large number of applications from it, and no ripping program seems to be able to detect it. If I open EAC and run the setup wizard, it will ask me to select the drive I want to use from a drop-down menu below, and there is no menu. I've looked everywhere in the program and can't get the drive to be recognized in it. I had the same problem with AudioCatalyst.

Also, when I try to run setups for a lot of things, I'll get an error message like "Application Error" "The application failed to initialize properly (0x0000006)." and then I have to just terminate it and I can't get it to work. I also get problems a lot when I try to drag and drop files from the CDs. It'll say it has a problem with moving it or something, and it just won't budge. Sometimes this will only affect one file on a CD, sometimes several, sometimes whole folders.

What's going on??

motherboard chipset drivers is the only thing that comes to mind, the IDE chips to be specific

Try disabling DMA on that drive (you might have to disable it on more than just that drive, due to shortcomings in Windows' drivers, AFAICS). I have a friend who has a VIA-chipset board with an Afreey drive and he has to disable DMA in order to get it to function without errors. There were also aome issues with the VIA 4-in-1 drivers. I think I had to not install them to even get that marginal hack to work.

I think I may have installed those 4-in-1 drivers. Is there any way to tell that? And if I did, is there any way to uninstall them?

Also, I can't seem to find where you disable DMA. Any idea where in Win2K it is?

I know I made a great post a while back on how to enable/disable DMA in win2k. Alas, I cannot find it. Attached it a screen shot of where to go. Basically you want to get to the properties of the IDE controller from Device Manager. If you are using a RAID controller on your board, you probably will not be able to disable DMA.

I think that the 4-in-1 drivers show up in the Add/Remove Programs control panel.

Possibly a cable? Ill have the same problems on one of my CD drives, and then eventually the whole thing disappears along with a Win2K message yelling at me for unplugging stuff.

It's a rare thing so I don't care much, but my guessis I either have a bad cable, or a bad spot on the motherboard. The hard drive (seldom used) connected to that same cable goes as well at the same time.

I'd swap cables on it for a while and see if that changes anything. At least you can knock one piece out of the chain.

Okay, I disabled DMA, and I now have no problems with CD drive access in regular explorer-type operations. However, EAC still doesn't think I have a drive. I've attached a picture of the setup wizard:

I forget what OS you're running. Maybe you need to install some ASPI?

I'm running Win2K Pro. I already installed some ASPI thing, but who knows if it did what it was supposed to. I don't know anything about that stuff unfortunately. Anyone have a link to a recommended file for me to download? I don't know what to look for.

Maybe you need to uninstall it?

I'd say try this, if you haven't already...

Ah yes, that's what I installed. didn't seem to do a darn thing at the time though.

I'm having these same problems again. I know this keeps coming up, but I've never found a good solution, and I can't remember what solved it last time. It might have been a reformat that did it. I don't want to do that

Has anyone had success with this recently? I don't want to uninstall Nero, because I can't find my key at the moment. I'll try uninstalling EAC, but I don't think that's the problem. Any other ideas? The above suggestions didn't work last time or this time.

*edit*
Scratch that! Apparently this is a new problem that worries me a little more! I ran the configuration wizard, and apparently EAC can see the drives, but doesn't think anything is in them! When it runs the tests, it keeps asking to put an audio CD in the drive and I've tried several but it can't see them. What is wrong??

*edit edit*
I appologize. Apparently this problem is actually pretty common. There is a sticky thread on EAC's forums about installing the correct ASPI layer to solve the issue. I found the VOB ASPI layer and using the option in EAC to select it, it is all working now. Thanks anyway. I was just panicked because I had to listen to these tracks on a CD for a listening exam tomorrow, the digital audio cable on the CDROM isn't working, and my CD player broke! AH!