[eclipse699]

I installed Norton Antivirus on my XP system. All my CD/DVD drives are disabled. When I uninstal Norton everything works fine. Any explanation/suggestion for this problem?

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Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. I have been using NAV for years and never experienced that. Did you have another AV program installed prior to installing Norton? Did you remove it before installing? I would suggest going over to symantec.com. You can request assistance from their tech support via the web page and they will communicate with you by email.

[austin_o]

Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. I have been using NAV for years and never experienced that. Did you have another AV program installed prior to installing Norton? Did you remove it before installing? I would suggest going over to symantec.com. You can request assistance from their tech support via the web page and they will communicate with you by email.

[Johanna]

I've heard Norton slammed six ways to Sunday, but disabling optical drives is a new one on me. What does Device Manager say about your cd/dvd drives?

Johanna

[Dena1223]

I, too, have been using Norton for years and never encountered any problems...until now. Here's my story:

I recently performed a system recovery and installed Norton SystemWorks 2005. All was well until I attempted to use my CD rewrite drive. The Autorun/Autoplay functionality seemed to start to fire up, but I never got the window prompting me for what I wanted to do. I then went into Explorer and was able to see the contents of my R/W CD (that I had successfully used multiple times) but wasn't even given the option to "Erase this CD" from the File menu. Since I was in a hurry, I then decided to simply write the file I needed to the CD R/W and deal with the lacking functionality later. I successfully "drag-and-drop"-ed the file I needed, then went to the File menu and clicked on "Write these files..." and was prompted to insert a disk in the drive.... Things just went downhill from there. I attempted this whole scenario with another R/W CD and got the same results. I checked the properties of the CD Rom drive and everything was set as it should be - but nothing works.
Later, I simply uninstalled SystemWorks (successfully), rebooted and all was well with my slave drive world again. Aggravated with SystemWorks, I went out and bought Norton Internet Security 2005, installed successfully, and lo-and-behold, I am now encountering the same issues with my slave drives. I uninstalled, and again, all is well with my slave drive world.

Not being one to bow to defeat, I went through several iterations of installing the different components of both products and have pinpointed it to Norton AntiVirus 2005 as the thorn in my side.

I have since talked with a friend who is encountering the same problem with her CD/DVD drive on her Dell laptop since installing NIS 2005.

I then attempted to get help from Symantec and was apalled to discover that they want to charge me $29.95 for an "incident". I have sent 4 emails to Symantec, and am being ignored. There is nothing on their website that comes close to covering this issue.

I've been searching the internet high and low, and have yet to find a viable soultion to this other than taking advantage of Symantec's 60 day money back guarantee on both products and finding some other AV s/w.

[Johanna]

Control Panel> System> Hardware>Device Manager
Locate the optical drive and right click to uninstall. Reboot. Let Windows detect the "new" hardware. More than likely, XP will find the generic drivers it needs to operate the device. If it doesn't, let XP on the internet to get them. (Click "update driver") Let us know if it works.
Johanna

[Dena1223]

Johanna:

I did as you instructed, and all is well with my slave drive world again. Interestingly enough, too, is that it also doesn't take as long for my PC to boot up and during boot up, the optical drive isn't being hit every second or two. Thanks for the info.

Dena

Oh yeah, my friend also did this to her Dell laptop and she's back up and running too. Thanks again!

[Johanna]

Glad everything is operating correctly again. Thanks for posting back with the good news!
Johanna

[collven]

I am having the same issue, and uninstalling my drives didn't fix the issue. I have WinXP with Norton SW 2004. My dvd-rom drive is slaved to my HD and my cd burner is master and the 2nd IDE port. I have uninstalled both drives, reinstalled firmware, and even reseated the ide cables, and nothing helped.

[Johanna]

collven- best if you post your issue in Hardware. I doubt it has anything to do with Norton or XP.
Johanna