I Broke My Cd-rw Drive

This is really screwed. I accidently broke a component in the inside of the drive and now its ruined and I have to buy another cd drive. But thats not the worst of it. :( . Before this happened I was fooling around with partition magic (an execellent program if I may add) and I accidently deleted my boot.ini file on a separate partition. Now that wouldnt be that much of a problem condidering as how all I do in a situation like that is boot into the recovery console and do a bootcfg /default or fixmbr command and have it booting up in no time. Its happened many times before so I was prepared for that. What I wasnt prepared for is my long fingernail breaking off a plastic component peice in the cd drive. Actually the xp boot disk was kinda dirty so before I put it in I decided to clean it off when alcohol, then since I was doing that I decided to clean the bottom part of the cd drive off a little because it was dusty, but I never should have tried to stick my fingers in the inside of it.

What saved my tail was my western digital hard drive boot floppy. After about 7 hours of trying to get it to work I remebered I had that rescue floppy. The problem was I had taken the label off, I dont remember why. So I had to put in one floppy at a time out of about 90 floppy disk I have, and finally I was able to load the diagnostic software from the floppy and fix the mbr.

Xp should have an option to boot into dos like you could in win 98 or other earlier editions of windows.

And yes my cd drive is still broken, luckily my o.s. can work without one for now. :angry:

Ouch, that has to suck. :blink:

Time to check out Best Buy's/ Circuit City's sunday insert. :(

Try to think of this as an excuse to upgrade to something better. Something DVD-RW-ish :D

Hope you find something decent... and inexpensive.

Thanks, I think I found one I like already, it was in an old sunday ad from lastweek in microcenter. Its a usb 2.0/firewire dvd+r/dvd+rw & cd-rw for $230. I really wanted an external drive anyway and I figure an external basic cd-rw drive wouldnt be enough for me anymore.

I still wish I hadnt screwed it up though. :angry:

Thats gotta suck. I know a friend who accidentally hit his CD-RW drive with his knee and broke it! (Don't ask me how that happened! :lol: :lol:)

Man, if you weren't looking for DVD capabilities, things would be easier. Sites like TigerDirect.com sell CDRW drives for 30 bucks.

Quote:

---

Thats gotta suck. I know a friend who accidentally hit his CD-RW drive with his knee and broke it! (Don't ask me how that happened!  )

---

I've done that too. It's really easy, if you leave the drawer open, to catch it with your knee when you sit down or stand up. That is, if you have your box under your desk.

I learnt my lesson with a LiteOn drive when i 'derailed' it. Luckily, i was able to take it apart and fix it fairly easily. I'd only had the drive for a month, but have had a generic dvd rom drive for 2 years without that problem.

LiteOn cdrw drives work well, and are good value, but are a bit flimsy.

LOL HAHAHA your problem :lol:

I had been using Windows Update, and, you've guessed it, at the end it needed to reboot Windows. Of course, I decided to do that.

What I was not expecting was that the coffee cup tray would be retracted when it rebooted, and I ended up with coffee all down the front of the machine, with some finding it's way inside, particularly into the floppy disk drive.

I had to dismantle the machine and wash everything in soapy water to get rid of the coffee, it hasn't really worked properly since.

I suppose it's my own fault in a way, I should have got some cups which fit into the hole properly, but I haven't seen any. Does anyone know where to get them?

lol, dude you ever heard of a beer mat? they can hold coffee cups just as well you know. :P