PC problem help

[tommy]

I have a problem with my secondary PC that seems to me like my DVD rom drive may be crashing my computer when a disc (PC games only) is run. I used to run the same games fine on this PC on my DVD drive and had no problems.

Looking at my PC the computer says the drive is running fine and it does detect a CD in the drive, it seems although the drive reads and detects CDs when the drive begins to spin the disc, if not right away after a few seconds the game crashes to windows and sometimes crashes the whole PC.

If i run a DVD movie the drive runs and plays the movie with no crashing. Emulaters that are hard on my video card run fine with no crashing, that to me tells me my video card is fine although PC games crash me.(no disc needed for the emulater)

I have ran many virus and other spyware tools and all seems fine with no errors.

Does this sound like a bad drive? Can the drive work but only on certain tasks?

PC specs: Win XP SP2, AMD64 3200+, 1GB Ram, Radeon 9300 128 MB PCI card. (weak video card but worked fine before)

I have not changed or added anything from the time everything worked fine till the time the crashing started.

I will probably end up just buying a new drive and see what happends. If anyone has any ideas i would be glad to hear them though.

[shmokes]

Try running something like Virtual Drive or Daemon Tools.  Mount an image of the disc on a virtual drive and if it works fine you'll know it's either your drive or, possibly a problem with the IDE controller or something, but probably the drive.  Thing is, I don't think it's the drive.  I think it's the videocard, in spite of the emulator thing.  Or maybe something else that just isn't popping into mind at the moment.  But I don't think it's the drive.  All your drive does is read data and send it over the wire to your computer.  It doesn't care whether it's a game or a movie.  All it sees are 1's and 0's.

[tommy]

I have and run the daemon drives for the dreamcast emulater and they work and play cdi images fine.

Playing soul calibur on the DC from the video card play the game fine with no problems, the dreamcast emulater is very hard on video cards and causes no problems.

HL2 plays fine and also does not need a disc to run the game. Once i put in the madden 07 or gta sa disc i have problems that did not occur before. I can't seem to figure it out.

Maybe the speed the drive needs to spin the game is causing it trouble? Can it be drawing too much power and the PC is shutting down to protect itself?

Thanks for trying to help anyway.

[shardian]

Do you have up-to-date drivers for the vid card?

[tommy]

I updated the card drivers and games that ran problem free had problems, i rolled back to the driver that worked fine.

[NightGod]

It's very possible for the DVD portion of a drive to work fine while the CD portion is messed up. I've seen it dozens of times.

[tommy]

Thanks to all who responded.

Today after running a DVD the drive made some strange grinding noises, i think i'll toss it. 

[Harry Potter]

Hehe. Tommy likes tossing to DVDs.