I have a crankie DVD-ROM drive. It’s always been crankie and I didn’t remember how crankie it was until this morning.
I had this computer built for my by a local computer shop up in Portland, Maine in the spring of 1999. I bought it with an old DVD rom drive, which probably cost me about $70, and it only does 4x dvd and has trouble playing new multilayer disks.
I spent the summer of 1999 with my aunt in Philadelphia, this was the first time I met Michael in real life, we had known each other online for about 9 months. That summer I was there my DVD-ROM stopped working, the drive wouldn’t even open. I rebooted, nothing. Windows couldn’t even see the drive. I left it alone for a while, and eventually shut down my computer because it was annoying me.
When I turned my computer back on the drive worked fine.
Fast forward 5 years. It’s March of 2003 2004 and I’m ripping some oggs from a CD. I sat back and watched the first episode of Coupling while it was ripping, and was surprised that i wasn’t done making the oggs when I was done watching the show. The encoder was having trouble with the last two songs. So I let it run for a while until it was done. Once it finished I played the two songs it had trouble with. No sound. So I figured the cd was screwy and tried to open the drive. It wouldn’t open. I tried all sorts of things, and it just wasn’t seeing the drive anymore, so I decided to boot into Windows. Windows couldn’t see the drive. I booted into linux and during bootup tried to open the drive, no luck.
For the past two days I’ve ignored the problem. After the issues with the cdrw earlier this month I just didn’t want to think about this at all, stupid cdroms!
This morning the power went out for a few minutes and Michael was up to shut down my system.
When I got up I booted up, still ignoring the problem. Then a friend of mine wanted to try out xchat for Windows, so just for fun I booted into windows to try it out since I never had before. While booting up I heard a noise from my DVD rom drive, so I pushed the button to open it and it opened.
Now I don’t know enough about hardware to understand what’s going on. Why would a full shutdown work to solve this stupid problem and not a simple reboot? What could be controlling this craziness with the drive?
*wanders off*