WinME can't read CD filesystem; DVD, other OSs are OK

[swsnyder]

I friend has asked me to look at her computer. This WinME system (yeah, I know...) has 2 optical drives, a Sony CRX100E CD-RW and a Hitachi GB-2500 DVD-ROM. Neither drive can read CDs placed in them.

This is not a hardware problem. Both drives are fully accessible in Linux (Knoppix live CD) and the 1st optical drive can be booted from in DOS. Both drives are correctly identified as being present in the BIOS.

Each drive is given a drive letter in WinME and correctly identified. Each drive can correctly determine in WinME whether there is a disk present in the drive or not. In WinME, any given disk in either drive will show as having zero bytes used and ~650MB available.

I just had a brainstorm and tried a DVD in the DVD-ROM drive. It works correctly! So it appears that this WinME system simply cannot read the ISO9660 filesystem.

I have an old version of "Easy CD Creator" (formerly by Adaptec). It includes the "CD Copier" utility. Using this utility, I can copy a CD from one drive (the DVD-ROM) to a disk in the other (the CD-RW).

The drives actually work. It is just that WinME can't read a filesystem from either of them. More specifically it can't read a CD filesytem , since DVDs read OK.

I installed the latest (late 2002) ASPI drivers from Adaptec. No difference in behavior.

Any advice on how to restore the ability of WinME to read a CD filesystem? Thanks.

[pranav81]

I had that problem long ago,but on Win 98 SE.I reinstalled Windows over the current installation and the problem was gone.

But I only had a CD-ROM then and it only read pressed discs and did not read 99% of the burnt CD-R's.


::Pranav::

[swsnyder]

I had that problem long ago,but on Win 98 SE.I reinstalled Windows over the current installation and the problem was gone.

Well, since this is not my machine I'm reluctant to take such a drastic step. Presumably this will screw up the existing WinME configuration and all the updates that have been applied to it.

This system is working fine (well, "WinME fine" - ahem) except for the inability to read the ISO-9660 filesystem.

Thanks for the response.