I'm having a peculiar problem and I hope someone has the answer.

A couple of months ago I bought a new P4 2.0GHz system that had Win98SE pre-installed on the hard drive, and a generic 16x burner. I haven't gotten around to upgrading to XP yet, though I plan to do so.

Everything worked fine until last week. Last week was the first time I tried to copy from a VCD to the hard drive on this new system. All I get is "Cannot read from file or device".

The VCDs in question were written by this drive, and play perfectly on other drives and on standalone players.

I *can* copy files from a standard ISO software archive CD; I CANNOT copy files from a VCD I burned myself, or a music CD (likewise burned by me).

I think this must be a Win98SE issue, because

1) I did not have this problem on my old 433MHz system running Win98 and

2) When I boot using a boot floppy with CD-ROM support, I can copy the files to the hard drive.

So...does anyone know how I get Win98SE to let me copy from a VCD that I've burned? I suspect this is some kind of built-in "copy protection" on Microsoft's behalf, since it won't copy from an audio CD, either.

Will I have this same problem when I upgrade to XP?

Note: I've tried to do the copying under Windows using both drag & drop AND other programs (VCDEasy, Nero) to move the files to the hard drive; no dice EXCEPT by using a plain boot disk.

Help...?

Win98 has native CDROM support and it appears that the CDROM drivers have become corrupted. To fix this click on Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Hardware -> Device Manager. Find the CDROM in the devices list & right click on it. Select 'remove' and reboot.
This will force Windows to set up the CDROM again and should cure the read problems.

Just tried that...no go. Exactly the same error as before! Grrr...

It's possibly due to a dirty CDROM drive, they can get fussy if the laser gets dirty. Here's a cleaning guide http://www.deinmeister.de/cdrep_e.htm if you wanted to try cleaning it.