[ice_glitch]

My Sony CD-RW CRX216E used to be able to read games such as Rise of Nations, Age of Empires II etc. just fine, in fact I had them installed and uninstalled them cuz I was running out of space on my Hard Drive. So I wanted to reinstall Rise of Nations. Now I put the games in the drive and the drive whirrs and my explorer.exe crashes. I put the same games in my other Dell 4300 and the games read fine without error. Also, sometimes I will start up my computer and My Computer will not even show a (d drive at all. I have to restart the computer for the drive to show on my computer. Sometimes I put in games and it says that it is not the correct CD, but it is. Could this be a problem with the CD-RW reader going defective?

 

[please]

@ ice_glitch
I answered your post in another thread before I saw this on. You have more info here, so I will respond again. You could try a lens-cleaning disc. You could also try uninstalling/deleting your drive from within device manager and restart your computer, letting WinXP redetect and install your drive.

It could be your CD-RW drive is going bad like you suspect. Sometimes a weak power supply could also be the cause, but if you have no other funny symptoms involving other components, it may be the drive. Check that the power connector and IDE cable to the drive is tight. New DVD-RW drives are inexpensive now and are pretty good. BenQ and NEC are two good choices you will be happy with