Hey all! I wasn't sure where to post this problem, as it involves both hardware and possibly software problems, in the end I went with Hardware so apologies if I made the wrong call!
I have an Acer Aspire 7741G running Windows 7 with SP1, it has an intel Core i5 cpu, with a 750GB hard drive, and 4GB RAM, the graphics card is an AMD Radeon HD 6550M. The DVD/CD-ROM is an HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GT32N.
I decided to reinstall Windows yesterday, just to clean up my machine, and used the Acer Erecovery Management tool to do a full reinstall. Everything seemed to go well (I had the 2 bars showing progress of the install, etc....), then the computer restarted and immediately gave me the dreaded BSoD with the error STOP c000021a (I think it was this). I tried to restart Windows normally, numerous times and it either shutdown, or showed a BSoD and then shutdown. When I tried to run in Safe Mode I got the same BSoD. I eventually managed to restart Windows by choosing the 'Start Windows with Networking' option or something like this.
As soon as Windows had restarted, I decided I should burn a copy of this clean install, just to be on the safe side (something I should have done when I first got the computer, but never got around to!). This is when I realised the the DVD/CD-ROM was no longer working. The drive is visible in My Computer and the Device Manager says that it is working correctly, but it will not read any disks. I have tried music disks that I burnt myself and shop bought music disks and dvds and nothing works. The green light flashes a few times and it makes a whirring noise as though it is about to read the disk, but then it just stops. When I double click the DVD/CD-ROM drive in My Computer it ejects the tray and asks me to insert a disk.
Up until this point I have had no problems whatsoever with this computer and the DVD/CD-ROM was working before I reinstalled Windows!
I have tried updating the driver, but get the message saying that I have the correct driver installed already and I have tried uninstalling the device then restarting the computer. I also tried deleting the Upper Filters and Lower Filters in the Registry, as suggested elsewhere. I thought that maybe the current driver could be corrupt and have tried searching for another copy, but have had no luck! I have also just checked the hard drive and memory for problems because of the BSoD, and both checked out fine.
All of my problems have occurred since using the Erecovery program, which I don't understand as this is supposed to restore the computer to the nice clean factory defaults that I had when I first got the computer, not cause problems that I didn't have previously!!
Apologies for the really long post, and any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!!
