At 04:43 PM 3/14/2004, jerry crider wrote:

>hi there lister, i have a friend that crashed her hard drive and
>i was trying to put a new one in, but am haveing the  most probs i
>have every had, i think it be couse its a hp i aint had a lot of
>luck with them!! well i installed it and tryed running the
>recovery disk but it formats and starts the install and then
>calls for the secound disk about five mins,in to that disk it
>stops and says , cdr101:not ready reading drive m abort retry
>fail, i have removed the battery for 24 hours so it would reset
>bios and i have fdisk,i even tryed installing just off my own
>windows 98se disk and it gets to the first time it restarts and
>then it says invaild medeia on drive m? for the live of me can
>any one help ,it has a p3 1gig a bran new white label 20 gig hard
>drive and 256 meg of ram,with a cdrw  from hp. please any help
>would keep me from going bald from pulling my hair out!! and
>again ty in advance jerry the fatboy crider,ps it a (hp pavilion
>xt 953)


 From what you have stated the CD Rom drive is the problem.
It is either very dirty and needing a cleaning or the drive is failing.
If the drive is dirty enough to generate that error, then you need
to run a cleaning disc in it numerous times.  If you have access
to an air-compressor, a good blast of air into the drive with the
drive door open, is something I would do, (and do quite often
when working on systems with older CDRW drives).

Another point, the early CDRW drives did not take much in the
way of usage before they failed.  I personally used up numerous
CDRW drives until the last one I bought, a Teac SCSI drive.  This
one has lasted for about two years now, but then again I use my
DVD-RW and DVD+RW drives a great deal more than the CDRW
drive.   But, back to your problem.  You probably should prepare
to be replacing the drive.  One good thing is that these ATA/IDE
drives are not very expensive these days.

     Bob Wright
The NoSpin Group, Inc.
http://freepctech.com - http://nospin.com


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