Installing to hard drive from CD-Drive problems.

Julimbob

Julimbob

New Member
Hi,

I have a friend who is having immense problems installing anything from his CD Drive to his hard drive. We've managed to install windows vista onto it with no problems but from there no other programs will install from disks.

What happens is part the way through whatever it is's installer it comes up with an error saying a file could not be copied or read or somthing.. :confused:

We have replaced the disk drive many times and still get the same problem, so its looking like the hard drive. However, we did have no problems installing vista.. and I have since copied a huge about of files (20 gig) onto his hard drive with no problems.

The only problem is installing things from disk onto the hard drive.

Does anybody out there no of perhaps a fix for the problem? Reinstalling windows didn't solve this problem, and apparantly it did the same thing on windows XP.

Thanks very much,
 
Besides a drive lens needing cleaning which is less likely the cable used is pne thing to consider since this has been seen with different drives. If the drive is an ide type using a flat ribbon type cable I could recommend the Antec Cobra round cables for the $10 price since those are tough! If the drive is slaved to the hard drive see if there is a secondary ide channel and master it there. This is common where a middle connector on a flat ribbon type cable will cause problems when teh cable gets dryed up and somewhat brittle.
 
Thing is he can play DVDs off his disk drive. Only problem is when installing onto hard drive. We've tried many different IDE cables and yes they are set to slave and master as he only has one IDE port, however changing the cable dosn't solve the problem.
I pressume it must be that his hard drive is faulty, but I guess it could be the IDE connector on the motherboard..?
 
A bad connection on the board can't be ruled out. The Windows installation disks whether Vista or XP even 2000 are in a more general format due to the large amount of drives available. Whether you have a cd or dvd-r minus, plus, or plus-minus type drive that won't matter. But if the drive itself is a dvd+r instead of a dvd-r or dvd(+ -)r type many disks may not be able to be read. This would be seen on an older optical drive and other program disks. Most drives out now are both + and - capable. This seems like the most likely reason for the install problems.
 
If I let you know that we've tried many different type of disk drives, and that this problem has occured for all installs from disks exculding Vista. Eg. Lotro, Mcafee, C&C Generals, Battle for Middle Earth etc etc. (wide range).
would that change yur view of the disk drive to that its not a disk drive problem?
 
With drives and cables ruled out what do you have left but the board itself. If the battery on the board is weak or somehow the bios programming has become corrupted that will explain problems there. Another idea is to go over all settings for Integrated Peripherals and Advanced as well as hardware configuration to see if something is set wrong or disabled there. A shaky bios will cause problems with the ide controllers. A battery however is far cheaper to replace then a major hardware especially if you have tried the drives/disks in other cases and see good results there.
 
Clearing the cmos will restore the factory defaults. Any changes in settings would then have to be made again to see if that will correct this. One thought is to run memtest to see if your memory has developed any faults as a long shot there. A shaky bios from loss of information or a weak battery on the board can raise problems as well. If you remove the battery to test it that will clear the cmos right there. If it's found weak simply go to the watch/jewelry dept. in a retail store or where pocket calculators are sold for the replacement.

Most boards run the CR2032 number battery but take it with you to match it up correctly. The other step is going for a bios update in case the programming itself needs correction with a reflash of the bios. The default bios settings should see disks read normally if there's no other problems found like setting the drive jumper wrong for the position it is on the cable.
 
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