Whenever a disk is loaded into my DVD drive, the disk is automatically ejected for no known reason. Windows does not seem to detect the problem. Can you help? The computer is a Celeron 433 MHz running Windows XP.

We should first determine whether this problem is related to either the DVD drive (hardware related) or is a software issue. To do this, boot your computer into DOS and insert a disk into the drive, to see if it ejects. To create a DOS boot disk, place a blank floppy disk into the floppy drive and go to ‘Start’ menu > ‘My Computer’. Right-click on ‘3½ Floppy’ and click ‘Format’¦’ from the context menu. In the window that appears, tick ‘Create an MS-DOS startup disk’ and click ‘Start’. Once the disk has been created, restart your computer with the disk in the drive. Your computer should boot off the floppy disk to a DOS prompt. You will not be able to change to your CD drive and read any CDs, as the Windows XP boot disk does not include any CD drivers. However, all we want to check is whether the CD ejects. So, insert a disk into your DVD drive and see if it ejects. If it does, you have a hardware problem and should have the drive looked at and possibly replaced by a technician. On the other hand if the disk is not ejected, it looks like there is a problem with Windows and chances are this will be very tricky to fix. The problem shouldn’t be a driver issue, as Windows XP uses standard drivers for CD and DVD drives. So try booting Windows into Safe Mode to see whether there is a conflict between the CD drive and something running in Windows. Just after the computer completes the power-on self test (where all the memory tests, etc’¦ take place), start pressing the F8 key. Eventually, the Windows XP boot menu should appear. Select ‘Safe Mode’ and press ENTER. A strange looking Windows should load - don’t worry, this is normal. Once Windows has finished booting, put a CD into the drive to see if it is rejected. If so, please contact me again for further instructions to solve what could be a tricky problem. Hopefully the CD is not rejected and you can read the CD, so it is therefore something in the background that is causing Windows to reject CDs. Reboot your computer (Windows should load as normal) and go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘msconfig’ (without the quotes) and click OK. In the window that appears, click the ‘Startup’ tab. Deselect all non-essential applications from loading on startup (essential applications/processes include: RUNDLL32, systray, etc’¦). Click OK. Reboot your computer. Test again to see if the CD is rejected. If not, go back into msconfig and tick one startup item, reboot, test again. Continue this until you find the problem application. Should the problem persist you may want to try reinstalling Windows. Then should you still have problems, contact me again.