cd-rom drive of doom

[briannaplaysbassyea]

first, i'm only 15 years old. so dumbing down words may be needed . and my logic is a bit basic so haha. work with me here.


okay, so the year old comp was recently moved into my room. I set it up myself, plugged it in, set up the wireless internet, deleted old files, deleted carefully programs i didn't need (my dad's autocad, my dad's napster, my dad's itunes), defrag'ed to clean it up, updated flash and java and whatever else.

but the computer has had a problem since the dawn of time; according to a computer repair place, the cd-rom player is broken because of the motherboard. basically we put in a cd of any kind (music, dvd, game, application, etc.) and the computer starts working and poof, it reboots, and continues to reboot itself until you take the cd out.

pure evil, right? so i figured, using a online file storage place*, a usb flash drive, and this weird thing my dad has--its an external drive, i can get cd files on to my crappy computer!

and initially it worked. using the usb drive, i downloaded a pic file viewing app for my camera. then brought it to mr. crapface, downloaded the files to mr. crapface, found the executable file for the pic viewing app and it worked. but my little usb is only 256 megs, yeah sad.

and now i want to download photoshop to mr. crapface. and most cds are 600mb+ so obviously my baby usb was not going to do the job. that's when i whipped out the online file storage. i uploaded photoshop on the amazing computer (of course in my parents room) to the file storage, then went back to my room. logged in from my computer and attempted to download photoshop and it crapped out and didn't download the .cab file cuz the stupid storage site wouldn't support it.


sorry for yet another lengthy intro, but i'll do the same with my school nurse haha.

2 questions:

1. Can I use the external drive to get Photoshop (Elements 7, in case you were wondering) on to Mr. Crapface?

2. Is there anyway I can fix or upgrade Mr. Crapface without getting a whole new motherboard? Cheap methods (0-$70ish) would be appreciated, but i'll take more expensive routes if needed.


Mr. Crapface's Specs (My Computer):

approx. 1 year old
eMachines C2685

Intel Celeron CPU 2.70ghz
80 gig hard drive
448 mb of ram
(i told you it was a piece of crap)

Windows XP SP3 (2002)

looked in device manager for info on cd drive and i got:
LITE-ON COMBO LTC-48161H
(in device status box: Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver maybe corrupted or missing.)


any help would be appreciated! and if you need more specs than above i will make the attempt to find them.



*message me for the link to this site. it currently lets me have 5 gigs of storage for free. but there's other plans you can pay for larger storage.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

If you have the CD for Photoshop, use a program like ImgBurn to rip the ISO image to a file (an ISO is a perfect copy of a CD, except that it's a file on your hard drive, you can burn it back to a blank CD for a perfect copy of the original or you can mount the ISO on a "virtual drive"). Put the ISO on your external drive as well as a program called Virtual Clone Drive (you'll need this on the computer with the broken drive).

Virtual Clone Drive will make a "fake" CD-ROM drive under My Computer. This drive will look just like a real CD-ROM drive to the computer, but instead of putting in real CD's, you mount images (right click on the ISO file of the Photoshop CD and mount it with Virtual Clone Drive). It should run the image like the actual CD.

As for the CD drive, you can get a new one. DVD+/-R/RW burners (that read CD's and DVD's) are available for just $30 or so on Newegg if you can order from there.

As for online file hosting, if you really need it, I suggest you check out ADrive, you get not 5 but a whopping 50GB of free storage space. I was amazed when I found it, and as far as I can tell it's a reputable site (my files are still there ).

EDIT:
You say you can't fit Photoshop on your USB drive. Instead, upload the ISO file to the online host. Just simply copying all the files off the CD doesn't usually work because the installer is programmed to only read files from a CD drive. If you have the files somewhere else (in a folder, etc) then it won't find them and won't install. A virtual CD drive appears as a regular one to the installer and it works fine.

 

[briannaplaysbassyea]

thank you!


i will definately look into that other storage site. i love those sites, especially for file sharing, since i do wovel type things with my friends . and school! and playlists! haha. ^_^

but one more thing, the ImgBurn and Virtual Clone Drive, can i find these on download sites or do i have to go out and buy them?

again, i'm 15, i'm nun two brite. the world of technology is still new to me haha.

EDIT:

okay, i got the iso file and i downloaded the clone drive. but when i go to mount it, it fails hardcore.

i look for it in "my computer" not there. i go to control panel and its under "cd-rom drives" but it says the driver is messed up or something. i un then re installed it 4 times, and nothing. i tried updating, nothing. i restarted my computer...nothing.

i'm pulling out fistfuls of my hair, or will be shortly. it works on my parents computer (OF COURSE) but it won't work on mine! if you can help me out with this, that would be awesome.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

They're both free software, available on the Internet:

ImgBurn: The Official ImgBurn Website

VirtualCloneDrive: SlySoft Download | AnyDVD, CloneDVD, CloneCD, GameJackal, Any DVD, Clone DVD, Clone CD, Game Jackal (VCD is freeware, all the others on that page are trials)

Hmm...maybe your computer has a problem with Windows that makes it unable to see any CD-ROM drives. If you want to see if your CD-ROM drive works or not (to see if the actual drive hardware is damaged or Windows is just not working right and not finding it), get a bootable CD (if you have your Windows install CD that'd work, a Linux distribution [download an ISO and burn it with ImgBurn] would work too) and put it in your computer. Then turn off and restart the computer while the CD is in, and if the drive works, the computer should boot whatever operating system is on the CD instead of loading Windows. If this works, the problem is within your Windows install. You could fix this by reinstalling Windows, but that means you have to erase your hard drive (so back up your stuff!). See if you can boot from the CD drive, because the CD drive itself may actually be fine.

 

[joeten]

you could also try uninstalling the driver for the combo drive and then reboot the comp and see if windows reinstalls the drive or you could go here The CD drive or the DVD drive does not work and follow the instructions very carefully