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Old February 13th 18, 12:30 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Posts: 1,453
Default 1st Daily Start Sound

casagiannoni wrote:

Dell Inspiron about 6 yrars old. First startup or waking from sleep,
in a given day, and the CD drive is "jazzed" up then coasts back down
taking a couple of seconds. Makes no difference if the drive has a
disk or not. In the paast I noted this only infrequently, about every
month or so, but now it's every time. Anyone know what this is all
about ? PS - everything else completely normal.


No mention of the OS. If Windows, start it in its safe mode. That will
eliminate non-critical services and startup programs from loading. If
the spinup doesn't happen when startup programs disabled then one of
those causes the problem. You didn't mention if the CD spinup was
during the POST and *before* the OS loaded or after the OS loaded. If
the CD spinup is before the OS loads then you have a hardware issue (see
Paul's suggestion). You might also wander into the BIOS settings to see
if any apply against the optical drive. For example, you could remove
the CD as one of the boot devices (if you never boot from it). Use the
HDD/SDD as the first boot device instead of having the BIOS check for
media in the optical and diskette drives. You said "waking from sleep"
(which is not the same as hibernation) so it could be some software you
load when you start Windows or something you loaded after starting
Windows. If the problem is exhibited only when Windows is loaded, you
need to test with a cleaner Windows.

I've run into software that included utilities to keep the CD "awake"
which ended up keeping it running (spinning). Took awhile to find the
culprit and then I got rid of it. As I recall, it was some utility
includes with a Creative Labs audio card but that was like a decade, or
more, ago. Might've been for gaming so CD-based games were faster
instead of having to wait for the disc to spin up.

I've even hit anti-virus software causing the problem. Avira Free, for
example, on my hosts with 3.5" diskette drives, would cause the diskette
drive to scan once per minute. I would hear a grr sound for a second
and the diskette drive's light came on. Something was trying to check
if there was a floppy in the drive. Turns out Avira was polling all
local drives even when they were not being accessed by the OS or by any
app. Uninstall Avira and the problem went away. Install it again and
problem reappeared. Avira claimed it was such a rare problem that no
one else reported it (which was false because I found several other
users noting the same problem with Avira) and they claimed that they
couldn't reproduce it (which really meant they didn't bother to test
it). Had to ditch Avira. No such problem with Avast, BitDefender,
Defender, MalwareBytes, or any other anti-virus/malware software that
I've tried.