can someone please help. i have an artec cdrw, its being working fine but now when i put in a blank cdr the drive constantly has the light on and will not copy cds or copy from hard drive. my systm also locks up. i am currently using the most update version of nero and have also tryed clone. can someone please help, oh i have also tryed removing cdrw from system and letting windows auto detect still without much luck. am i going to have to do a complete windows install.


many thanks

I did a complete drive format/install of Windows XP to fix the exact same problem. My system would lock up during a burn or the CD-R light would turn on and stay on.
It got worse just after I used the FixIt utility to "fix" my drives, i.e., "Blue screens". It turned out my HDD had some new "BAD Clusters".
Not sure if this helps.

Can the drive still read CDs?, if so it's possibly a corrupt ASPI layer that's causing the problems although CloneCD not working is a worry as Clone doesn't use the ASPI layer. However it's still worth replacing the ASPI to see if that helps.

Go to Cyrus Troy's (http://www.cyrus.troy.btinternet.co.uk/downloads.htm) and download ASPI Check and Force ASPI, run ASPI check then Force ASPI, this will overwrite and repair your current ASPI layer.


If that doesn't do the job then it may be a hardware issue. Check the IDE cable and power cable are properly connected. You can also attempt to clean the drive http://www.deinmeister.de/cdrep_e.htm

If it doesn't read, you've checked the cables, it shows up in Device Manager without errors/conflicts and you've cleaned it then my call is it's dead.