[grizzly]

compaq desktop, intel pr3, win me 4.90.300.

my friend's cdrw drive won't open or eject.

on the inside of the pc both the cdrom and the cdrw rom drives appear to be missing a wire connection to the left of the white plastic connector with the yellow, black, and red wires, and the connector that looks like grey duct tape; there are three tiny holes with prongs (to the left of the grey duct tape thingy) to plug something in and this is the middle hole i am talking about; what's missing is the small black plastic connector with white, red, and black wires (the connector itself has 4 holes.

the cd rom drive opens but the cdrw rom drive doesn't open.

he said that the third unused white plastic connector's wires (which also connects to the cdrw drive via the cdrw's white plastic connector)lead to what i think he means is the hard drive (he describes as a large silver box at the back of the machine). on my pc, that connector is plugged into my motherboard.

at first i thought that missing the black plastic connector and wires was the issue. but the cd rom drive doesn't have that connector either but it opens fine.

anyone have any idea what the problem could be?

thanks

 

[dannyboyfx]

the red yellow and black wires are the power wires. If these are pluged in, it should open. The gray cable is the IDE cable, and the other prongs are for one or both of these: Slave/master control and for sound to go directly to the audio system. So if the CD Writer is plugged in and it still wont open, then maybe something is going wron from the power supply to the CD Writer, try switching the CDrom and the CDR around. IF it still dosent work, yet the CD Rom works, then there may be something wrong with the writer. May need more informatiion.

The Power supply has four prongs, so does the audio thing. the power supplies are larger.
The power wires are yellow, red and black the audio is white, red, black.

 

[grizzly]

that worked. thank you. only now, his roxio easy cd creator won't let him burn. after he loads his music in the software and clicks to burn it, the drive pops out for him to put in the blank cdr and his only choices are cancel or retry. he retries and it starts to burn but then stops in the middle of the operation and it aborts with no error messages.

personally i think it is the fact that the machine he is using only has 127.0 mb RAM. i forgot to ask him how much video card memory he has but i'm pretty sure that isn't much either. actually, 127.0 mb RAM doesn't sound right either. i have never had a machine with that little bit of RAM so i don't know if that is normal or if he is reading it wrong. he doesn't know anything about computers, so he might have got that wrong. but he read it as he was looking at it and so i tend to believe he is reading it correctly.

i tried to find some specifications for Roxio Easy CD Creator but can't find them anywhere. he doesn't have the box it came in so he can't look for it.

anyway, i think that is the problem -- not enough memory. i know that there still could be something else wrong with the drive itself, but it looks more like a memory problem to me. do you agree?

thanks

 

[dannyboyfx]

yes, Roxio site says that you may need 256 mb ram.

http://www.roxio.com/en/products/ecdc/system_requirements.jhtml

 

[grizzly]

would it really make a difference with just that 1 byte missing? she has 127 mb and the software specs are 128 mb. i say it would make a difference but i'm not sure. thanks

 

[dannyboyfx]

it may. Is that the requried or the recomended. I think it may be the reason why it shuts down early.