External DvD taking over~

[Tahj]

Hey everyone=)

A few months ago, I purchased a game (install via CD). The game had problems, whether it was due to not liking Windows XP or whatever - I ended up installing it w/out issue on my older Win2k computer.

Anyway, after spending a couple of hrs on the WinXP computer trying to install, & eventually giving up as noted, I realised that CD's may or not play in my cd drive. Be they music, burned, or game cd-roms, the drive began to seemingly work when it wanted to.

Thankfully, I have an external DVD-rom drive, & could just throw my games/music in there for play. Now, however, the DVD drive seems to have taken over & the CD drive recognises nothing.

While this is annoying, now I'm having another issue that may or may not be connected. As of a few days ago, any game I'm playing (using DVD), when I exit out of the game I either get a black screen - & it never errors out, or if it does I can't see - or I get back to the desktop, but am unable to do anything, almost as tho the game never closed. I am unable to alt-tab, pull up the task manager, etc. Thus, I end up restarting=(

Any suggestions on what the problem/solution may be? I'm a novice when it comes to hardware, so be kind=)

 

[The_Other_One]

I'm not sure what you mean by it's taken over? It almost sounds like the internal drive has just died...

As for the other problem, my computer has given me similar problems in the past when changing resolutions getting out of games. Try running the same res as your desktop setting in the game. Also, updating all your drives and what-not couldn't hurt.

 

[Tahj]

Thanks for the response=)

When I say the DVD has taken over, I mean that it seems as tho the DVD drive has decided that the CD player is not worthy, & thus has taken over in place of everything the CD drive once did - on it's own, as best as I can tell.

Example:

I went to reinstall a game last week. Pop the 1st CD into the CD drive. The indicator light blinks once & not again - which means it doesn't recognise anything - looking at the CD drive via 'my computer' will show nothing there, despite the fact there is...

Then the DVD drive begins whirring, despite the fact there is nothing there. I get a Windows msg indicating that the auto-install feature began but cannot continue due to no disk being in the DVD drive. Bleh!

I ran the little troubleshooting thing in the System Tools ('this device is working properly'), & have done a driver update for the CD drive (said there was none).

I suppose the problem of the game-hanging could be related to resolution, which is unfortunate, due to the game I installed last week (in my example) - the highest res it goes to is 1024x768 & my monitor is set to 1280x1024. I wonder tho, because it's only been crashing the last couple of days, whereas it exited & ended properly the 1st few days. The other game I simply couldn't see anything in 1280x1024 it was so small, but I can try changing the reso right before exiting.

Cheers,

~Jay