On 9/6/2013 9:51 PM, hp wrote:
On 9/5/2013 9:10 PM, Paul wrote:
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!

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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

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I see I was just a touch brief in my info, The opticals are on
the motherboards single IDE connector. They seem to totally disappear
from windows when they 'go by-by'. Usually they are seen and 'activated'
on a boot.

I think the MB just predates AHCI, I seem to recall exploring AHCI but
not seeing anything that allowed me to use it if I had it. So I don't
even recall ever trying that at all (yet).

But eventually they disappear over time, a day, less then a day, over
night, several days, its hard to pin the event down that seems to be
causing the problems. Once 'gone' windows explorer doesn't 'see' them,
nor does any other software that is used in windows to access the
optical drives.

Otherwise I have no clues there is anything else that's amiss with my
setup. Just the vanishing act the CD/DVD drives pull.

I usually run several applications that wants the PC to be left on 24/7
so the only power setting I can find is only controlling the monitor,
and not set for any other actions.


Followup: had a hardware fault that killed the internet for 4 days.
So, I wiped the HD in the offending PC and started a fresh install
of win XP X64. Once everything was reloaded/re-installed I have been
'testing', so far the opticals that were pulling the 'Houdini act'
have been stable running now for 7 days of 24/7 on time.