Okay this is wierd everytime I put in a CD or DVD it spins then stops. I can no longer reformat windows as it just spins and never detects it... Any ideas?
It sounds like the laser in your cd-rw/dvd-rw has gone, if you burn allot of cd's the laser will eventually conk out. they have a limited lifetime. Replace the drive
I guess I forgot to mention this but, I have one pure DVD drive and one cdrw drive. Why would both drives be going at the exact same time? It detects the CD but it wont run the autorun.
Is this an actual copy of a Widnows disc or is it a "back-up" version? If it is the "back-up" kind, it is possible that you or whoever made it didn't make it a bootable CD.
I think this guy initiates *formats* from within windows instead of enabling boot-from-CD in bios... My computer stopped running Autoruns on CDs and DVDs too. I know it's not a hardware error, I think it's some CD/DVD burning software I installed that detects what media is put into the drive - it seems to have disabled autorunning. Its not really a problem though, I dislike autoruns and prefer to access my CDs/DVDs manually.
No I have boot from cd as 1st on the priority list. I know enough not to try to format from within windows as I have formated 4 or so times in the past 2 years. And I have used the Windows XP disk I received from dell every time.
Ah right, so all of a sudden it stopped detecting your Windows CD as a boot CD?
I had this happen on a friends PC - the DVD drive was faulty so I used a spare CD drive I had lying around instead and it worked fine.
I guess it could be your CD that is damaged? The bit that detects whether the CD is bootable or not is right at the inner edge of the CD, and if its got the slightest scratch on it, it will disable the boot detection and skip straight past it.
on my Asus board you can press F8 during POST to select boot device, and at one point, it was the only way to get into windows, even though I had the correct drive on top priority. It depends what motherboard you have, it usually tells u what button it is.
Oh, are you a Dell?
Try borrowing a friends WinXP CD to eliminate the possiblity that it could be a scratched CD.