hp wrote:
Is there a setting in windows Xp x64 that chooses to turn off the
optical drives at any time??

I can boot my PC and have the use of the optical drives (CD, and DVD)
but if I go away from the PC and return later, (usually after the PC has
shut down the monitor (timed out)) the opticals might still be there, or
not.
Lost in windows explorer, and in other programs that might stand a
chance of looking at them.

thanks!

I'm not aware of anything on the IDE bus (ribbon cable
drives).

SATA has HIPM/DIPM for link power state management.
But the dialog showing here, only seems to apply to
hard drives. I don't know if optical drives happen
to get treated the same way or not. You would
think link power management would be the same
for both of them.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...hipm-dipm.html

That article is for Windows 7, but if you happened to be
using an AHCI driver in WinXP, the same features
might be present.

So that's a long shot.

Any power saving features that happened to be inside
an HDD or ODD, aren't likely to be nearly as much
of an issue. As a "sleeping thing", if the bus is
working, you can wake it by giving it a poke. It's when
the bus has sleeping states, that poorly coded drivers
may attempt to poke something, where the I/O path isn't
working (sleeping).

Also of note, is that "insane" SATA drives, are not
guaranteed recoverable. Twice now, I've had SATA hard
drives have some kind of issue with their controller
board. If I attempt to just "warm reboot" the system,
or even press the reset button, I cannot recover
communications with the disk. But if I power off and
power on, it comes back no problem, and no bad
sectors. The reason this happens, is on the IDE bus,
there is an actual "reset" signal, which snaps all the
hardware back into line. On SATA, there is no reset,
and if a controller board goes nuts, it must be power
cycled, worst case, to bring it back.

Paul