Computer question, my turn........

The 31st of this month, an insurance company I've been involved with for the last 16 years is turning off the lights and locking the door. I was full time for 12 years, and have worked there off and on for the last couple of years liquidating the company. (Liquidating an insurance company is not as simple as a retail or service business).

In the process, I recently "liberated" one of the computers to use in my shop for keeping track of labor times and parts purchases when I do customer work.

The unit has been wiped of everything but Windows XP. I intend to install my copy of Office XP for my purposes. I don't intend to go online from my shop. The snag is, the unit has 6 USB ports but no CD drive. I bought an el cheapo external CD drive that's "plug and play" through a USB port in order to install software. The computer recognizes the external drive, but when I insert a CD, I get a pop-up that says "Insert disk in Drive D" after I insert the disk.

From a link in the instructions, I downloaded a "Self Fix" program from my office computer onto a flash drive and ran it on the shop computer, but it didn't change anything.

I'm wondering if I overlooked something, or if I got a bad CD drive.

Any input?

BTW, I could almost write a book (and I may) on how an insurance company with some $60 million in annual revenue came to be ordered into liquidation.

Between our own management, clients themselves failing, and crooked automobile dealers filing phony claims, there's certainly plenty of blame to go around.

Two things I would try:
Try flipping the disc over, it is rare but I have seen drives that the disc goes in label down.

If that doesn"t work try unplugging the drive (with the disc still inside) then plugging it back in.

Try another CD and see if it the disc itself or the unit...

Most CDROM drives use a universal driver that is always "in" Windows XP, but it is also possible you got ahold of one that requires a specific driver...

You also might load the CDROM's entire image on a USB flash key and just install from that...


Howard

One possibility is: The CD that you are trying to read is actually a DVD and your drive will only read CD. Most new external readers are DVD drives which will accept either. May be the reason for it being cheap. Advantage of DVD over CD is they hold more data.

Hello Goose,
I would also recommend checking the CD drive with another disk, and see if it works.
Windows XP should recognize the drive, and install the driver. Plug in the CD drive while the computer is on. Sometimes leaving the drive plugged in, it will be recognized next time the computer is turned on. When the conputer is on
It should recognize it and install the driver.
It may ask you to select a source for the driver, so if you have one on a flash drive it will install it from the drive.
Guido.

If none of the other suggestions work, try changing the drive letter assignment.

- Go to Start & right click on My Computer (will also work on a My Computer shortcut on your desktop).
- Choose Manage
- Then click Disk Management on the left
- Choose the correct drive in the bottom half of the window.
- Right click the external drive's name and choose Change Drive letter and Paths
- Choose Change
- Pick a letter in the latter part of the alphabet and reboot.

Form your description, it sounds like your management team went at it the hard way. The quickest way would have been to let a reinsurance contract lapse.

Don't let the auto-play function take over. Disable it. That XP Office disk probably is written to seek your internal CD drive by default. Put the disk in, then go to "my computer" and click on the icon showing your USB drive. Then, "explore" until you find the install file with an "exe" on the end. Click on that file and it should install the program fine.

I think I'd buy an new internal DVD/CD burner-reader for $15 and install it. They're so cheap, it's the best way to go. IDE or SATA hookup. If your machine is older, it's probably IDE.

I'm wondering if the new USB drive you bought needs USB version 2, which your older computer might not have and it's confusing things.

The symptom sounds like what patsublett described, CD reader doesn't recognize a DVD.

Thanks for all the input. The disks I've tried are Office XP that are probably 5 years old and I've installed them in several other computers, so I doubt they're CDs, and I did try a couple of other CDs. I tried downloading Office XP onto a flash drive to go that route, but I couldn't get that idea to work.

I'll play around with some of the ideas mentioned here and see what happens.

Thanks again!

We did have some of our own management problems. Some of the clients that went under, to our detriment had gotten to be bad news and we told our president for a couple of years we needed to dump them when we could, but he apparently felt a certain sense of loyalty to them because they helped build our company in the first place, etc. He was a nice guy, probably too nice to be hardnosed in business dealings when he needed to be.

Then, the president found out it was more fun jetting around the country checking out golf courses than keeping his nose to the grindstone, etc. He lost his wife over the deal, not to divorce but to Lou Gehrig's disease. Apparently she was a carrier and the stress of the company failing triggered it.

Like I said, I could write a book. What was eerie was a year or so before the axe fell, I took a class in Human Resources Management at the University of Nebraska, and the professor, totally unknowingly, assigned me a similar situation as a topic for a term paper. After the fact, it became startling to see the comparison between my term paper and what actually happened to our company.

Office XP comes on a CD. It will have 449 MB of data on it. If you stuck a DVD into a CD-only drive, all that would happen is - it would act as if there is no disk in there at all - since it won't be able to see it.

If you insert your XP cd into your USB drive, then go to "my computer" . . . find the USB drive there. If it was recognized as you say, you will see it. When you find it - then right-click on the icon, then right click on "explore", then left-click on the file named "setup.exe" and the program should start installing.

Like I said earlier, you cannot let autoplay try to take over. There is a command in the "autoplay" file that tells your computer to find an internal disk drive, not a USB device. USB CD drives probably did not even exist when XP Office was written around 10 years ago.

Autoplay.exe is put there for people who don't know how to use computers and works fine in most situations, but not all. Sometimes it prevents the correct things from happening.

Sometimes things are settled with a match.