If I don’t have enough issues to deal with, my DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo drive has decided to stop reading last night! D:
Allow me to explain what happened. In Facepunch, someone posted a thread in the Tech Support forum, asking if his RAM was faulty. I noticed how his issue was similar to mine so I replied, and I was told to run memtest86 by burning it to a CD. Now I’ve been meaning to run memtest86 for sometime.
So I downloaded the .iso, and searched for a blank CD-RW, pop it in and tell Nero 6’s InCD to format it for me. It attempts to. As it’s about to finish, Windows cries foul by saying “SHIT! There’s a scratch on it! I can’t format this!”. So I attempt to cancel. However, my drive has other ideas, continuing to format the CD even though I told it to fucking stop.
On top of it, it starts to slow down Windows until it freezes, forcing me to manually shutdown.
I get the CD out, and try another, and notice what a difficult time it’s having reading it. The read light blinks on and off repeatably. No spin up of the CD to read it either.
So… I fucking broke the drive! This is the 2nd DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo drive that broke on me in my life.
Fortunately, today things are looking a little brighter (despite we’re under a slight risk of severe weather). I called them and explained the problem and they say “Yeah. You’ll have to get it replaced.”
Though they have no combo drives, they have DVD Burners. I questioned if it would still burn a CD-RW and he said yes.
So I’m not only planning to get a new Hard Drive, but a DVD Burner. And both will be SATA drives.
BTW. If you wanna know if I finally got to run memtest86, fortunately my old 3(1/2) floppy drive still works. I manage to “burn” it to a floppy and ran the program for two hours.
No errors. So it’s not my RAM causing it.