Topic: The bloody hell is wrong with my DVD drive?

[Quemaqua]

It will play CDs just fine in foobar or WinAmp or whatever.  No problem.  And last week I ripped about 20 CDs using CDex.  No problem.  Today, suddenly, for no reason CDex stops working, complaining about ASPI.  This has happened before and a reboot always solved it.  I try it... and it doesn't solve it.  I reinstall the ASPI stuff, and then it recognizes the DVD drive, but when I try to rip the songs from it, I get nothing.  The progress bar doesn't move.  I download EAC to try that, and it doesn't work.  Won't detect the drive.  I find a separate .DLL for the ASPI stuff and throw that in the DIR, and yay, it detects the drive and the CD.  But now it says it can't find a matching read mode for the drive, and no selection will work.

What the fuck happened?  It was just fine, then it imploded.  I even got the latest firmware for the drive and still nothing.  I've googled the problem for hours now and come up with exactly nothing.  I have absolutely no idea what could have happened.  It didn't even happen after a reboot.  The only thing I can think of is that I installed an audio converter, but that shouldn't have any effect on the drive... it's just a converter, not a ripper.

Any ideas?

EDIT - Note also that in EAC I tried switching from the ASPI interface to the native Win32 NT/2000/XP interface, and this didn't change a damned thing.

EDIT x2 - Well, I tried ForceASPI and killed the ASPI layer entirely before reinstalling it and rebooting the system.  I boot up, try CDex... nothing.  It recognizes the drive and the disk, but still sits at the progress bar doing nothing.  So I try to close it.  It crashes.  I use the task manager to kill the process, then try to open up EAC, and nothing happens.  I try again, still nothing.  I look, and the CDex process is going, now with two instances of the EAC process... but no programs.  Try to load Firefox, same shit.  Try to shut down the system, nothing happens.  O... kay.  Give it a hard shutdown, turn it back on, and now things are up again and I'm afraid to even fucking touch the stupid thing.

Also, a couple of the billion times I rebooted tonight, the system didn't come up.  Stalled at the XP load screen.  This is the same shit that started to happen when my 300GB HDD was going out before.  Now I'm really worried.  I don't have the time, energy, or money for anything to go wrong.

EDIT x3 - Just gets more and more fun.  Apparently CDex trying to rip anything just destroys the system.  If I try to cancel it when it doesn't work or whatever, any program I try to load after that won't, and the process will just sit there, and the system won't shut down.  However, now EAC is working.  So... yeah.  No fucking idea what's going on, but at least EAC is finally doing what I want it to.

[scottws]

I don't know anything about CDex so I can't help you there, but yeah definitely sounds like an ASPI layer problem.  I've had that happen to me several times.  In each case, the fix was using the Adaptec ASPI layer DLL.  I put it in the system32 folder as well as the EAC folder.

I think the ASPI layer you use matters.  I think there are several out there, but the only one I've ever gotten to work right is the Adaptec one.

[Quemaqua]

Apparently there are niggles with that one, though, and a lot of people claim it isn't the best one to use.  ForceASPI seems to be the best package according to a lot of people (though in truth it's just a different package for the Adaptec controls).

[scottws]

Well this ForceASPI clearly isn't working for you.  I would try something else.

[Quemaqua]

Already have.  ForceASPI was the only thing that at least got EAC to work.  So far that's the furthest I've been able to get.  Nothing at all has gotten CDex to stop acting idiotic.

[WindAndConfusion]

Out of curiosity, why are you so intent on keeping this drive? Aren't you planning to upgrade your system soon, anyway? DVD burners are easily under $40, including shipping.

[Cobra951]

This doesn't seem like a hardware issue, though.  How would replacing the drive help?

[WindAndConfusion]

This doesn't seem like a hardware issue, though.  How would replacing the drive help?

Mostly I was responding to this:

Also, a couple of the billion times I rebooted tonight, the system didn't come up.  Stalled at the XP load screen.  This is the same shit that started to happen when my 300GB HDD was going out before.  Now I'm really worried.  I don't have the time, energy, or money for anything to go wrong.

Optical drives are cheap enough that you sometimes find one in a box of Cracker Jack's, they take less than fifteen minutes to replace, and unlike hard drives, they don't contain files you might desperately need. On the list of things that can go wrong with a computer, a busted optical drive is near the bottom.

[Quemaqua]

I doubt that problem has anything to do with this either.  If anything, it has to do with another slowly dying Seagate drive.  Though it better not, or somebody's going to suffer.

[sirean_syan]

You know, you wouldn't be in the mess if you have sent back that other drive, like, a year ago.

[Quemaqua]

 ... how do you figure?  This is a problem with my DVD drive, not my replacement HDD.  Though it seems the replacement may be developing problems of its own.  But... yeah.



 ... shut up.