Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Another Person With A Computer Problem

I recently bought a Philips cd burner , and upon installing it ,it caused my computer to crash. I have a 00' or 99' compaq pesario and it has been fine up till now. I also recently installed Windows Me about two weeks before this happened. I forgot to install the software for the cd burner before taking my tower apart and installing the hardware. So now I am stuck in this hole and I am barying(sp) myself in a deeper hole by trying to fix it myself.

Any help would be so greatly aprecciated.

Assuming you get the software installed correctly, this sometimes will stop cd-rw's from crashing machines: click Start, Settings, Control Panel, System, Device Manager. Click "cdrom" and click your cd-rw, then click "settings" and see if the box marked "DMA" (Direct Memory Access) is checked. If it is, uncheck it, click OK, close out, and reboot the machine. I had to do that to make my Iomega cd-rw work, and it does now. If it doesn't work, go back in and re-check the DMA box, and try reinstalling the drive and software. Good luck.

that might help but everytime i start the computer it only gets past the windows me splash screen then a blue screen comes up and says" windows protection error, please restart your computer." Then when i restart it ,it goes to safe mode and i cannot work on any of my hardware under safe mode for some reason aing it imposse to install the software for it.

theanks for the quick reply

Just putting in a cdrom won't crash your computer. That sounds plain silly. The fact that you haven't even installed the burning software is what's odd. I think it is just a coincidence. Anyway, since you can get into safe mode, there is hope. You guessed it, windows ME actually has ONE useful feature...system restore! Click run, type msconfig...then click launch system restore. Go back a day or two, hopefully that will fix things for you. If not...perhaps try yanking the drive and putting the old one back before trying anything. See if it works again.

I have already tried that and neither worked. Man i am starting to think i am $h!t out of luck.

Try disconnecting both ide and power cable from the drive, if it boots up then its the drive...simply return for a new one. If it still does the same and system restore doesn't work try booting to safe mode click start...run...type in scanreg /restore and see if that works for ya.

P.S.
I have seen it where drives will not allow a computer to boot into windows but will let the computer boot into safe mode. Also try setting your video to vga if after doing the top doesn't work. Just go to msconfig...click advanced and then click on the one that has vga 640x480x16, reboot and see if you get into windows. It could just be a corrupted driver!

This maybe a silly question but I have to ask it. Do you have your CDRW and hard drive sharing the same IDE ribbon cable? If you do...don't! I think that before you do a restore, pull the CDRW and get the system up and running. Looking at my CDRW install booklet (my drive is 3 years old) it says to install software first before installing the drive. I don't have great faith in those restore options. Seems sometimes they create problems of there own if you can't stablize your system first. Good luck!

the cdrw software is for the burning process only. If you install it before the drive the drive won't read the software. Thats like saying install your video drivers before the card. boot to safe mode remove the drivers from DM turn off the computer and then remove the drive from the ide cable AND power cable.

BTW you can install a cdrw drive and a hard drive on the same cable with out any problems of recognition of either, you would run into problems with cd to cd burning. just remove the drivers and the drive.

There are no drivers for a CDRW drive..just the CD burning software...and he said he didn't install ityet. Putting in a CDRW drive without installing the software, it will function just like a regular CDROM. Have you tried removing the drive and putting the system back the way it was? FWIW I think windows ME just crapped out on you...

There is drivers installed for it, they are located in the device manager. How else is the drive going to work if it doesn't have drivers for it. But i agree, it could be simply that win ME finally went on you.