cd-rom issues...

hello everyone!

i just happen to have a problem with my cd-rw drive... it was working fine until a couple of days ago, but then it would refuse to read any CD i would put in, showing it as blank. i thought maybe the drive itself might be busted (since its almost 4 yrs old), so i bought a new one... same problem. i checked in the device manager and it says the device works properly. now i have tried to boot the comp from a cd, like explained in the sticky post, and success! it worked... but it still sees every cd as blank when loaded in windows.
the cd-rw drive is a benq cd-rw 5232x. os is win xp.

any help will be greatly appreciated, thank you in advance.

Hi zed welcome to wd forums.

Can you go back to that sticky & try the 'filter load order tool' ?

Post me/us up the results & we'll see if that gives any clues :)

hello again

i am not sure i understand everything about the filter load order tool... sorry, im kind of a newbie at this...
what i can say is i managed to make it work, but the rough way. everytime i want to load a cd, regardless of the contents, i have to go to device manager, open the cd-rom drive, go to volume and make it "populate". so yes it works, but it can get a bit tricky if anything installed exceeds 1 cd. maybe i am missing some "auto-play" option in there?

thx for the help =)

Mmmm .. well as they say you live & learn ..

..go to volume and make it "populate". so yes it works..

At least so far we can conclude that the unit is 'well' as far as reading & cabling go .. but that's an entirely new level of 'partial workingness' that I've not come accross before, however some googling seems to indicate that's a problem with what you are finding a problem - these here filter drivers I was waffling about :)..

To use the filter driver load order tool, you download devfilter.exe to somewhere you can find it, then double click it to make it run. Then Just use the up & down keys or select one of the drives shown in the left hand pane with your mouse - we want a note of the info for upper & lower filters shown in the top right box, (this is the bit folks usually get stuck with, as they don't realise what I/we want) like so :-
http://www.bustrace.com/images/devfilter.gif
(so I'd either want a screenshot with that info, or for you to type out - upper class filter=pwd_2k etc)

alrighty, i downloaded that program and here is what it gives out...

upper class filter: GEARAspiWDM
upper devie filter: redbook
device object: BENQ CDRW 5232X
lower class filter: Cdr4_xp
lower class filter: PxHelp20
lower device filter: imapi

i hope this is the info you are looking for =)