A Salutary Lesson Has Been Learned

It is said that you are never too old too learn, and that has been proven too me, yet again.

I bought a new HP Pavilion Elite desktop computer in February this year, set it up, installed an extra DVD-ROM drive along with some extra RAM, and then sat back to enjoy my new purchase.

From the start, it was plagued with long boot times of up to ten minutes, but I had a 2-year pick up and return warranty so I bit the bullet and sent it back for repair, not once, not twice, but three times in six months.

During that time the hard disk drive, the CPU, the motherboard and a TV tuner card were all replaced, two sets of recovery discs were sent to me, and a boot trace just resulted in a blue screen. Nothing seemed to cure the problem.

I lost count of how many times I wiped the hard drive and started again. Event Viewer, Task Manager and Processes threw up nothing untoward, until one day I decided to run a full diagnostics check, which revealed that the new DVD-ROM drive I had installed failed a couple of read-write checks.

I removed the suspect optical drive, restarted the computer and couldn't believe it when the time from boot up to desktop was less than a minute.

Just to be doubly sure, I put the DVD-ROM drive back and sure enough, on the second restart, the boot time had increased to eight minutes.

So there we have it, even brand new parts can be problematic, and I know one thing's for sure, if ever I get a similar problem, I'll be checking the hardware first.

So, my lesson learned is that it's not always drivers that cause problems, hardware can too, and not always in the way you would expect it to.

We need to remember unplugging the DVD drive as a troubleshooting step as it turns up every few months as the cause for installation and boot failures/problems, but not enough to list it by rote.

Twice recently I posted to clean the DVD drive, reinstall, try another or replace - failing to mention simply to unplug it..

bigmck said:

Glad you got the problem corrected. -- Just curious, why would you want two DVD drives?

Cheers, bigmck. Having two drives is just a personal choice really.

One is a Blu-Ray drive and the other is a DVD-RW/RRW drive. I do a lot of music compilations for family members and using one drive to rip music from their CDs while using the other to burn their compilations saves a lot of swapping discs.

Not only that, if one does give up the ghost, I've still got one to use until I can get it replaced. They're not expensive, either.

gregrocker said:

We need to remember unplugging the DVD drive as a troubleshooting step as it turns up every few months as the cause for installation and boot failures/problems, but not enough to list it by rote.

Twice recently I posted to clean the DVD drive, reinstall, try another or replace - failing to mention simply to unplug it..

It's a valid point Greg, and one that I'm not likely to forget! :)

I wonder if all these problematic DVD drives are SATA drives...?

Or does this happen with IDE drives too?

Well, mine was a SATA drive, so I can't really answer your question.

Time for a bit of research, I think.

Problems happen to both SATA and IDE drives. No device is 100% reliable. Though with new technologies the reliability of new products is coming closer to 100%.

Most of the failures are happening to devices with moving parts, due to manufacturing defects and wear and tear. The solid state devices with no moving parts are more reliable than the HDDs, DVD writers etc.

Most of the problems due to Hardware are detected in it's early life. If a device works satisfactorily for atleast 3 consecutive days, then it will function without any problems for a long time. That is why it is preferable to conduct burnin test on the laptops and desktops before despatch.