FeedingDragon wrote:

The only things I left connected was my boot drive, my video card, and my network cable.

And your CD-ROM drive, you mean?

A couple of things come to mind: is your CD-ROM drive on its own IDE channel? If so, is it properly set to Master or Slave? (Do not trust cable select; I never do.) Is the CD-ROM drive properly identified by name in the BIOS? Are you letting the BIOS auto-detect it, or have you tried to force it manually?

Yes, and my CD-Rom drive. My MB only has one IDE port and the CD-Rom is jumper set to Master. The HDDs are on SATA2. BIOS detects it correctly and automatically. Also, I have never trusted cable select either. I always set Master/Slave by jumper.

Well, considering you say this came out of nowhere, maybe it would be worth trying to change the battery on the motherboard at this point? (You can get five perfectly good CR2032's for two bucks or less from the local dollar store here.)

Actually, it has a new battery now. Sort of silly, the Legacy USB HDD support in the BIOS doesn't like my external HDD (My Book 2TB,) so I had to Disable it. While resetting BIOS to try and see if it was a BIOS error on my CD, I had turned that back on without realizing it (and I had forgotten about turning it off in the first place.) Well, when it stopped booting I called Gigabyte and they told me to remove the battery (unplug the system,) and count to 30 before putting it all back and trying it. Well, had problems getting the battery out, and when I did it went flying. I still haven't found the blasted thing, had to use the manual to figure out what type of battery to get to replace it 🙁 What makes it worse, is after I bought a new battery, put it in, screamed because it did the same thing, wondered where I was going to get a new MB, I finally remembered, disconnected my external drive, and it booted right up for me. I then went into BIOS and turned the blasted legacy support back off.

p.s. I also turned it back on (disconnecting my external,) and tried the CD. No fix there 🙁 I've checked drivers, removed devices, changed settings and can't figure it out. The fact that it is actually getting worse (in that now sometimes disks won't even initialize,) I'm fairly convinced that it is the drive itself. I've e-mailed LG to see if they have any ideas, but so far, no response.

In order to get it over with, a new CD drive for testing purposes can't be that expensive these days.

Alternatively, like I said, the standard diagnostic would be to boot your computer with Linux (possibly from a bootable USB drive) and see if the problem persists.

OK, after several days of fighting and screaming at my computer, I've found a USB thumb drive that allows me to boot to it (if it is set up right.) Have to turn legacy USB detection on in BIOS to do it. That is a pain because the My Book Essentials HDD causes my computer to freeze during HDD detection with that on if it is attached.... Known problem, no fix, just have to keep it unplugged if I decide to boot to the thumb drive. Got a hold of several boot disks, and using them set up my thumb drive to boot. That itself was real fun, had to get another computer to make images of the boot disks, then copy them over to this one to install onto the thumb drive. Now I have the problem that every single generic driver I could find refuses to detect my CD-Rom drive (they all say nothing detected.) LG doesn't provide a driver of any sort for the drive (Windows has their own drivers, so we don't need to provide one, and to heck with people who don't use Windows.) I tried booting up and then just putting disks in the drive. However, the drive would spin up and flash a few times, then stop. Normally, it spins up, flashes a few times, pauses, then has a long flash (or maybe a whole bunch of very fast flashes,) then stops. Hard to explain in text but the pattern is totally different. Have no idea if the disks are readable, as I cannot get drivers to detect it,.

Are you booting Linux, or DOS, or what?

DOS drivers can be a little finnicky, but if they aren't detecting the drive at all, then like I said, a new drive might be a fine idea.

Well, new drive is on its way. It wasn't that expensive, and is an upgrade to what I have to boot, so I'm mostly happy. Now, if I put the new drive in and the same problem continues, I think I'll scream 😒

Thanks for the attempt at helping. Got the new drive in and everything seems to be working fine (knock on wood.) So far, not crashes on CD/DVD changes. Keeping my fingers crossed. If it happens again, I'll be back.

OK, its started up again 🙁 Did some more testing. If I boot to safe mode, I can cycle through my stack of CDs (Music & Data,) and DVDs (Video & Data) without any issues. If I boot to normal with all services & startup programs turned off (in msconfig) I freeze up some time during the stack every time. As a further problem, the new drive is also a Blue Ray reader, and my system freezes up on Blue Ray disks all the time (even in safe mode.) So, is that the same issue or 2 different ones? If it is 2 different issues, what is present all the time in normal boot (with all services & startup programs disabled in msconfig,) that is not present in safe mode. I've changed my RAM out (got some sticks that were more compatible during all of this.) I've disconnected everything except the video card and the boot drive (and the DVD-Rom drive,) and the problem remained. I'm not contacting MS again, as the last time I did so, my XP became invalidated shortly afterwords (and they didn't help anyways.) I've checked BIOS versions available and I have the latest non-beta version for my MB and the only upgrade on the drive site is a Windows 8 support patch.

Any more ideas out there???

OK, final post (I hope.) I think I have it licked finally. The Blu-Ray issue was because of lack of file system. I have that now and my Blu-Ray disks read just fine. This did not fix the overall freeze problem. Just the definite, always going to freeze, of Blu-Ray disks. Now I just have to get a DVI cable instead of the VGA cable I have now to watch Blu-Rays 🙁 Oh, and a player and burning software that works with Blu-Rays. VLC works, but have to do some fancy dancing to get copy-protected Blu-Rays to work. Cannot really test that till I get the non-protected ones working though.

The original problem, thanks to other forums, is now solved as well. It seems that the culprit was the InCD software that Nero installed even though I told it not too. I uninstalled that and everything works just fine now. It seems that one of the MS Updates broke it (not sure which one though.)

I'm still going to have to eventually research Nero (my primary choice in burning software,) and find out the oldest one that supports Blu-Ray. After 6 (the last version I bought,) the size of Nero started growing by outrageous amounts. Going from a 50 meg install to a 5 gig install just seems off to me (when there wasn't that much in functionality added in.)

Ha, now that you mention it, I actually do remember similar problems due to Nero.
Get rid of it, use some other burning software, perhaps Alcohol bla%. Since it is trialware you can test first whether it works.
Nero became too much of everything and none of it good enough. And adding things so deep in the OS is just asking for trouble.

FeedingDragon wrote:

The Blu-Ray issue was because of lack of file system. I have that now and my Blu-Ray disks read just fine.

I don't understand. What did you get?

The original problem, thanks to other forums, is now solved as well. It seems that the culprit was the InCD software that Nero installed even though I told it not too.

But you said you had problems with a fresh install of XP with nothing else installed?

I use Ashampoo and/or ImgBurn for all my burning needs and am perfectly content.

Jorpho wrote:

I don't understand. What did you get? […]
Show full quote

FeedingDragon wrote:

The Blu-Ray issue was because of lack of file system. I have that now and my Blu-Ray disks read just fine.

I don't understand. What did you get?

The original problem, thanks to other forums, is now solved as well. It seems that the culprit was the InCD software that Nero installed even though I told it not too.

But you said you had problems with a fresh install of XP with nothing else installed?

I use Ashampoo and/or ImgBurn for all my burning needs and am perfectly content.

Blu-Ray uses a newer UDF file system (2.5 I believe,) that doesn't come with XP (or the prior OSes I imagine.) I had to track down one that would work and install it. It was basically just an inf file and a sys file. Right click on the inf file and select install. It copied the sys file to where it needs to go and enabled reading UDF 2.5 formatted disks.

Yes, I did say that.... I remember testing it before I installed Nero as well. When I did my new install, the first thing I did (after installing drivers and updating,) was test my CD Drive and I remember having problems. I reinstalled Nero after that. But removing Nero's InCD definitely fixed the issue. I do know that Nero (6 at least,) uninstall is bad about removing files that were on the system before Nero was installed. Possibly breaking other installs and such. Maybe InCD replaces something else that was also causing the problem (same version maybe,) and when I uninstalled InCD it removed it..... Though nothing else seems to be having any problems with missing files....

Dominus wrote:

Ha, now that you mention it, I actually do remember similar problems due to Nero.
Get rid of it, use some other burning software, perhaps Alcohol bla%. Since it is trialware you can test first whether it works.
Nero became too much of everything and none of it good enough. And adding things so deep in the OS is just asking for trouble.

I've actually purchased Alcohol 120 and I like it. The problem is that it does not allow burn verification. That is the one feature of Nero that I have yet to find on the other burning programs I've tried out. Without Nero I'm left using the DOS fc command on each and every individual file, and that is a real pain in the rear. Also, I'm used to Nero and like some of the other utilities that come with the suite I purchased. Primarily Nero Recode. The other re-coders I've tried just weren't all that good. They were either very difficult to use, extremely inaccurate, or something else. With Nero, if I say I want the total result to be 4.27 gig, then it will be 4.27 gig, or I would be told in advance that it cannot reach that goal (and I could decide to remove this file or that file.) On many occasions with the others I've tried I would say 4.27 gig, it would say fine, but give me either 4.6+ gig, or turn around and give me 3.5- gig with really sucky graphics.

FeedingDragon wrote:

The problem is that it does not allow burn verification. That is the one feature of Nero that I have yet to find on the other burning programs I've tried out. Without Nero I'm left using the DOS fc command on each and every individual file, and that is a real pain in the rear.

Are you sure Nero does a byte-by-byte comparison with the data on the burned disc and the data on the hard drive? Lots of CD burning programs (pretty much every one that I've seen) can "verify" a disc, but I think they just check that each sector on the burned disc is readable.

Anyway, I can't recall ever hearing about fc before now. Checksums are the way to go. There are tons of suitable programs out there that will do the trick; I like WinMD5. You just calculate the hashes for the files that you burned, and then compare them to the hashes of the files on the disc. It would be nice if there was a burning program that could calculate these automatically, but aside from maybe k3b on Linux, I haven't seen it.

Primarily Nero Recode. The other re-coders I've tried just weren't all that good. They were either very difficult to use, extremely inaccurate, or something else.

Not even DVD Flick?

To compare files you can simply use Windiff.

Forget Windows 8 but most of all try to forget Microsoft. I had a similar problem although not Cd related and went through the same pathetic customer service as you. In the end I installed Linux and everything worked fine, never looked back

The Nero docs claimed, back when I bought it, that it did a byte by byte comparison, and it continues hitting the HDD pretty hard as it is doing the verification. I've never had a problem with DVD-R disks, but I have had the verification error out with the DVD+R disks occasionally. When it does, Nero states that file x failed verification (and stops at that point as a failed burn.) I've copied the file off the disk without error, but it fails fc check.

BTW - fc is a DOS command that stands for "file compare". I don't remember if it is built into command.com or if it is an exe or com program itself..... OK, quick check in command prompt, it is an exe program (fc.exe) I guess that settles that. But it does a character by character compare by default, but the /b option will set it to byte by byte binary compare instead.

I'm looking into Windiff right now.... I still prefer a burner that will do the comparison for me, but if Windiff will allow automation of a lot of the tedium I might be willing to start looking for a different burning package. Don't really want to have to buy something again, but if I want Blu-Ray, I may not have a choice. I'd still sort of want to have a package that includes data/audio/video building/converting/burning like Nero does. Though I admit I'm disappointed in the video building that comes with Nero (6 at least.) It gets the job done, but is extremely stripped down. No automatic sub-titles (can't have the signs & banners on my anime come on automatically,) for one example. Getting off the topic, but I guess while I have my tax return, I should look into something that will work better for me.

What Nero has that I like:
Convert Audio & Video for use on VCD (Video CD) or DVD
Automatically converts Audio for audio CD
Supports Multi-format CD/DVD burning (data & audio on one disk for example)
Support for non-standard formats (ISO9660, Joilet, UDF, Hybrids, etc...)
Performs a file comparison after the burn (if turned on,) to confirm that the files burned appropriately.
Will automatically re-encode video/audio to fit onto the size specified (instead of the hit or miss, lets try this data-rate combo, then another.)
Is very accurate on re-encode target values (though it takes a bit longer to scan the source video as it calculates possible values.)
Allows the building of menus, sub-titles, & language tracks for both VCD & DVD (though fairly basic.)

What my new software will need:
All of the above
The ability to encode, re-encode, burn, Blu-Ray as well. My burner supports every version of BR there is (dual layer, etc...)

What I would like it to have, but not really necessary:
Much better building of menus, sub-title and language tracks etc... allowing me to designate certain tracks as automatic or default, set some to work "with" others (separate subtitle tracks for signs & banners and English language that could play at the same time without issue.) What would really be nice is one that can use ASS, SSA, SRT, etc... style subtitles as well. Especially the ASS & SSA style, I really love those.

Any and all links to such software that doesn't cost astronomical amounts (really, the price some of these things are asking for.... Do they really expect the private sector to have that?) would be greatly appreciated. Would hate to cause a problem with off-topic posts and such, so feel free to PM them to me 😀 Thanks in advance.

It's nice to keep things public, and this is your thread, so I don't think anyone else will care if it goes off topic. 😀

DVD Flick is free and does all the things you indicate as far as DVD video goes, I think. The free version of Ashampoo does the rest.

The advantage to calculating checksums is that you can burn the calculated checksums to your disc along with your files. Then you can easily make sure that none of the data on the disc has changed whenever you want to check without even needing the original files you burned.

If you really want to be thorough, the easiest way to verify burned data would probably be:
-Create an ISO or BIN/CUE image with the files you want to burn
-Burn the ISO image (any worthy CD burning program can do this)
-Re-rip the ISO image from the burned disc
-Compare the ripped ISO image with the burned ISO image, using checksums, fc, or WinDiff.
This technique at least minimizes the number of operations involved.