mind of its own?

[swynx]

so we got this old computer. its an old dell dimension 8200. brother owns a computer shop he put it together for my stepdad as a decent gaming computer. its got a minor graphics card and 512mb of ram.

we play this game empire earth. u throw in the cd it boots up fine.

last night i tryed to install a game called "full spectrum warrior". i threw in the cd and the cd deal comes up with the mouse pointer. and u can hear the cd drive spinning. but u get nothing. after awhile it quits spinning. so i opened up run. put in "D:\setup.exe" and it tells me to insert a disk into disk drive d.

i put empire earth back in and without a problem it boots back up. i throw fsw in a few more times and it wont boot up. both cd's have no scratches on them.

the other day i threw in windows vista cd and i got the same thing. cd icon but it tells me theres no disk inserted. it wouldnt read it after i restarted it either.

any suggestions?

 

[Mark_88]

Hmmmm...sounds like the reader on the CD may be wonky...if one out of three disks works...odds are favouring the disks themselves are wonky...try a music CD...if it reads that you've just improved the odds that it is not hardware failure...

Short of that, it could also be that the driver on the CD needs to be refreshed...but now I'm guessing...

 

[ZackW]

It's probably the drive itself. Depending on how each disc was pressed or burned, the old burner could have problems if it's got any kind of dust buildup or the laser is a little bit out of alignment.

The good thing though is you can get a new cd burner for around $20 shipped from newegg.com to fix that problem.

 

[swynx]

the cd drive itself has gotta be goin out. i put in a cd and it opened it immidiatly. then i put in a different cd. and it took a minute to read it. thanx guys

 

[AllanD]

a Windows Vista install CD?

There's no such thing....


Windows Vista installs off a DVD-ROM.

I have four different Win-Vista installs and all are DVD-ROM.

Frankly it's hard to guess exactly what your issue is, it could be a dead drive bad cable or something as silly as a misjumpered drive

And yes, quite often if you set up a computer wiht a drive jumper installed on the wrong pins (the choices are "MAster", "Slave" or "Cable Select") they will someties work for days often weeks or months before they suddently decide to stop cooperating.

And because it did work (for a while anyway) it's something few people would think to check.

BTW, any computer with less than 2gb of ram drives me nuts...

I can't imagine attempting to play a game on a computer wiht only 512mb...



AD

so we got this old computer. its an old dell dimension 8200. brother owns a computer shop he put it together for my stepdad as a decent gaming computer. its got a minor graphics card and 512mb of ram.

we play this game empire earth. u throw in the cd it boots up fine.

last night i tryed to install a game called "full spectrum warrior". i threw in the cd and the cd deal comes up with the mouse pointer. and u can hear the cd drive spinning. but u get nothing. after awhile it quits spinning. so i opened up run. put in "D:\setup.exe" and it tells me to insert a disk into disk drive d.

i put empire earth back in and without a problem it boots back up. i throw fsw in a few more times and it wont boot up. both cd's have no scratches on them.

the other day i threw in windows vista cd and i got the same thing. cd icon but it tells me theres no disk inserted. it wouldnt read it after i restarted it either.

any suggestions?

 

[Ranger Kip]

it might be an older lense, so it wont be able to read some new disk formats, and sometimes it gets through, sometimes it wont.

kinda like with my 2002 KLH 14" TV with a DVD player in it, it can play blueray..... odd it is, because it was out BEFORE blue ray, and says nothing about it either, haha.

 

[cody93]

cd drives cannot read dvd disk, also, some older cr-rom drives cant read cd-rw, but can read cd-r. cd drives aint worth the hassle to fix, hell, u could get one of a junk pc on the side the road. hell, 512mb of ram is plently, avoid vista if u only got 512 tho, xp is not as demanding, and there realy aint much of a reason to upgrade if ur only doing basic task. ive played GTA SA, GRID, Flatout ultimate carnage on a pentium 4 with 512mbs of rambus ram :O heck, my IRC logging pc is only 16mb ram