I get all sorts of calls from clients who just bought a new CD-RW or DVD Drive and can’t get their system to reboot or respond. They experience the dreadful blue screen of death, or their computer just locks up and doesn’t respond at all. This is normally due to a faulty device driver and can easily be identified.


The best way to see if it’s a faulty device driver is to run the Verifier program in Windows XP.

Click on Start -> Run -> Type Verifier and hit ok.

Keep the settings on default or create a standard listing. Normally the default works fine without any changes.

Next select the drives you want to verify on the next reboot.

Now reboot your computer, if your computer stops with a blue screen it should display the error message with the faulty driver thats installed that’s causing the issue.

Next reboot the computer into safe mode and turn off the Verifier program by clicking on Start -> Run -> Type verifier/reset

Now simply reboot your computer again into safe mode and right click on the ‘My Computer icon’ and select ‘properties’ from the popup menu.

You should get the “System Properties Screen”.

Next click the Hardware Tab and select the Device Manager; simply select the new device by left clicking on it and then right click and select uninstall.

Reboot the computer again and proceed with installing your new hardware with the proper device driver.

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