Thursday, December 11, 2014

Start With The Basics

Yesterday I was working on Lucie's laptop - I made a rescue CD to use to restore her computer if something should go wrong.  I figured I better test it while things were working to be sure all was in order before I needed it.  So I put it in and rebooted the computer.  The laptop SHOULD have read the CD and booted up from that into recovery mode.  Nope - skipped right on past and booted up like normal.  Which is not what I wanted.  So I tried again.  Nope - goes right on past it.  So I checked the usual settings and the laptop was set up properly to read the CD before the hard drive in the boot up sequence, etc. etc.  I took the CD and tried it in another laptop - worked fine.  I re-made it anyway.  No better.  I put in a music CD and it played just fine.  Hmmm.  Now I am getting a bit concerned.  So I updated the BIOS and drivers and this and that.  Uninstalled and re-installed the CD drive.  Nothing.  I went onto the forums and did some research and posted my dilemma.  Others who had the same problem wound up sending in their computers for motherboard replacement.  I wound up calling the manufacturer and had to go through the usual checklist that the rep has to go through.  Bear in mind that each time I try something new, I have to re-boot the computer and wait for it to get fully operational - which takes a lot of time.  During that whole troubleshooting process, I took a look at the disk and another one I was trying.  Remember - I had tried them with success in another laptop so I was sure they worked.  But they were a bit smudged so I rinsed them off and on a whim, I took a quick swipe of the CD drive reader lens and blew out some dust.  Wouldn't you know that fixed it?!  Only took 5 hours of my time to try the basic, 3 second fix...  Then I went back to the forums and made my post of shame.  Maybe it will help someone else.