Smart and Friendly CD Rocket 8020 in Windows 2000

[millz 0]

Hello,

 

I own a Smart and Friendly CD Rocket 8020 CD burner (firmware v1.24, the latest). It works beautifully in DOS and Windows 98. However, when I boot into Windows 2000 Professional (SP1) the drive is not available. It does not show up at all on my system.

 

This was not always the case. On a recent clean installation of Windows 2000, the burner was visible for a short time. This had never happened before. There were two things that may have contributed to this:

1. I had a CD in the drive at boot time. This was the first time I had booted Win2k with a cd in the burner when reason 2 was in effect.

2. Since it was a clean installation of Win2k, there was no cd burning software on my system; specifically Easy CD Creator 5.

 

Easy CD Creator's documentation says it installs the latest ASPI layer onto the system. Before installation, I ran Adaptec's aspichk.exe program to check my ASPI layer. This program may or may not run correctly in Win2k, I'm not sure. The program reported no ASPI layer.

 

After installation of Easy CD Creator, I robooted my system. My CDR8020 drive was no longer visible, and aspichk.exe reported an updated ASPI layer. My suspicion is that before the EZCD installation, win2k saw the drive as a regular CD-ROM instead of a CDR.

 

My SCSI card is an Adaptec AVA-2906. I have worked with Adaptec's tech support on this problem, and as far as we could tell, the card is functioning properly. Smart & Friendly is out of business, so they can't help me.

 

The thing that triggere my post here, is the web page at: http://www.ntcompatible.com/old0100.shtml

 

This page lists the S&F 8020 as compatible with win2k and says to make sure you have the latest ASPI dlls. I have downloaded and installed the latest ASPI dlls from Adaptec's web site, but they have made no difference. Any ASPI dlls at all seem to make my burner cease to be visible from Win2k.

 

Under what configuration did you test the CDR 8020 in Win2k in order to get it working? What version of the ASPI dlls did you use? What version of the CDR firmware did you have? Do you have any thoughts as to why this may be occurring? Does anyone else have the same burner and similar configuration working under Windows 2000?

 

I'm really stumped on this one. Any help would be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Dave

[aburdick 0]

Did you ever manage to solve this problem? I developed the same prob recently when I upgraded to win2K; no amount of fiddling has yet enabled me to get my SAF cd-rw drive running again. I've you've learned anything more, I'd love to know about it .....

[millz 0]

I found solution....of sorts...

 

After spending countless hours trying to fix this problem, I found a solution by accident.

 

During the boot process, any cd drives on your system are checked for discs. If your drive bay is ejected at this point, windows closes the bay to search for a disc. All you have to do is immediately re-eject the bay after windows retracts it. If you boot with the drive bay open, the drive will subsequently be visible in win2k.

 

Just to be clear:

 

1. Turn on power. The BIOS will do it's thing. The BIOS will (probably) also close the drive to look for a cd.

2. Eject your cdr8020 as soon as win2k starts booting.

3. Windows will close the drive to look for a disc. Immediately hit the eject buttong to re-open the bay.

4. The drive bay will remain open for the rest of the boot process, and then your cdr8020 will be visible and usable in win2k.

 

I hope this helps!

 

peace,

millz

[aburdick 0]

Thanks! .... but no luck. It ejects properly (Step 2), but doesn't automatically close the drive, so i can't eject it a second time.

 

I wonder now if we're talking about the same device. I've got the SAF CD Pocket RW, which is a slim blue drive that attaches (to my laptop) by PCMCIA card. It is (or was) a beautiful little accoutrement, but nothing i do seems able to update it to w2k....

[millz 0]

Yeah, I have a CD Rocket 8020 internal SCSI drive. The laptop version probably suffers from the same bug (which I suspect is in the cdr's firmware), but the problem can't be worked around in the manner...

 

Short of hacking the firmware, I doubt you'll be able to fix things. If you're a programmer and the adventurous type, you could try debugging the win2k startup process using softice (www.numega.com, i think) or some other debugger.

[aburdick 0]

nah, i don't know programming from my elbow. bummer! it was such a hardy little package ....