Unreadable CD crashes my OS

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Somebody please help me!

My XP/SP2 crashes when I put a scratched or hardly readable CD into my DVD-RW drive and want to copy the content of it to my hard drive. The drive starts to read the CD, and after a few second the reading speed starts to fall gradually near 0 kb/sec, and the OS crashes.
When I just want to play an *.avi file with a videoplaying software directly from the same CD - without copying! - the OS doesn't crash!
Sometimes the OS completely crashes, even the mouse doesn't move, so I have to push the reset button, and sometimes the blue screen appears and shows this message:

MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION
...
Technical information:
*** STOP: 0x0000009C (0x00000004, 0x80545FF0, 0xB2000000, 0x00070F0F)

Interesting things:
- When I start to copy from a problematical CD and the OS crashes after 1-2%, after reboot the whole 700MB file is on the hard drive. It is unusable of course.
- When I connect an old CD-rom drive in addition (to the secondary slave IDE channel), it can copy the problematical CD to the hard drive (it is true that it reads very slowly), but it doesn't make my OS crash...

Config:
- ASUS K8N MB
- AMD Sempron 3000+ proc.
- SAMSUNG 3200 2x256 MB memory
- SAMSUNG 250 GB hard drive - primary master
- MOBIL RACK - primary slave
- PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-110D - secondary master
- ATI RADEON 9250 video
- CHIEFTEC 400W


Why don't I get simply the "Can't read CD" message instead of crashing???
What is wrong in my computer?
- The PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-110D? (Can it drag itself to an endless loop?)
- The NForce3 250 IDE driver? (But it works fine with my CD-ROM drive)

Please help!
spirite
 
I think you have illustrated quite well how poorly-written windows device handling is. I can also get similar symptoms if I try to write to a poor-quality CD-R. The writer will just hang the machine, though no crash occurs, I require an actual power-off to recover. This is on Win98se at work, and I have not (yet) had the same problem on WinXP, but I suspect it is common. Not always a full system crash, but you only have to look on this site to see that hardware problems often cause crashes on XP, and I strongly feel this problem is far WORSE on XP than earlier OS versions. Not restricted to Cd/DVD either - almost anything can bring XP down.

I notice you can read a CD all right to just play it, but not when trying to copy to HDD. This would normally be because both DVD and HDD are on the same cable (IDE connection). This is not the case with you, I believe, but you do have something called Mobile rack as primary on your second channel. This could just possibly be the cause of your trouble. You could try reversing the primary-slave connections on the cable if cable routing permits it, but I dont really expect that would help.

If you get a well-reproducible problem CD (can play but not transfer), then you will be able to experiment by disconnecting the mobile rack and putting the DVD as primary (on it's own). if that affects a cure, well, interesting....

There is likely nothing wrong with your computer, though perhaps if you are using a third-party driver for your DVD writer, you could look for the latest driver version on the manufactureres site.

The reason your older CD reader will manage to read a bad disk eventually is probably down to the completely different technology used for DVD as opposed to CD, and you would be advised to install a secondary CD reader permanently - as I have done.
 
Thank you for your advices!
I have tried to disconnect my VIPower Mobile Rack totally, but it didn't help. At the moment I have only my HDD on the first (primary) IDE cable, as master, and my DVD-RW on the second (secondary) IDE cable, as master also.

(My friend just told me today that the succesful avi playing is due to the video playing software which ignores, skips (jumps through) data losses, which is impossible when somebody wants to copy a CD to a HDD bit by bit.)

I don't want a miracle, so it is ok for me, if my DVD-RW can't read an "ancient" CD, it is acceptable; what I would like to achieve is to have my system warn me if a disk is unreadable instead of crashing... Somebody may ask why I put a CD into my DVD-RW at all. The first reason is that it copies 10 times faster than my CD-rom, and the second is that it can copy 7 CD-s out of 10 without crashing the system.
 
the system should not be crashing just because a CD is unreadable. it sounds like you already have some sort of system instability and the unreadable CD just pushes the system over the edge. you might want to check and see if any of your system files are damaged or missing. you will need your XP Cd in the drive then opoen a command prompt and type sfc /scannow this will run system file checker and will replace any damaged or missing system files. as for recovering files from damaged Cd's there is a freeware tool you can download that will help with this called CD recovery toolbox, you can download it here.

http://www.oemailrecovery.com/cd_recovery.html
 
Hi!
For all of you, who tried kindly to help me, here is what solved my problem:
I was very desperate, that nothing helped, so I finally bought a new Pioneer DVR-112D DVD-RW and put it in instead of my old and faulty one. From that point on, I have no longer problems with OS crashes.
thanx,
spirite
 
spirite,
too bad I didn't saw your thread before but a bugcheck of MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION caused by a mal-function hardware device.

pentium processeors contains a feature that called MCE (Machine Check exception) or MCA (Machine Check architecture) that help the OS and the processor to verify for mal-function hardware devices.

In your case , windows triggered you that your processor recognized a mal-function device. by getting a kernel/full dump of the BSOD, it is possible to tell you which device was mal-function. in your case , it was your CD-ROM.

Just my 2 cents,
EZ
 
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