Help: Roxio burner in Philips drive with no manual release...on XP.

Drive has green light on, acts like it's busy and won't release the CD
no matter what
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Oh, that's funny, it's good to see that Roxio's cd burning software is as bad as it's always been.

You have to turn off the computer, leave it off. While it's off, the cd-burner has a tiny little hole in it, right on the face, usually right below the tray that goes in and out. Take a paper clip, unbend it, stick it into the hole, push it in straight, that will trigger the manual opening mechanism.

Roxio software, ez-cd creator, or whatever they call it now, has always been absolutely terrible, the worst out there for burning cds. Windows XP actually has a very weak and limited feature cd burning capability, also powered by roxio's adaptec drivers by the way.

If you tried installing an old version of roxio's stuff you could have some very serious problems, if it's a new one it's just another roxio burning crash. If you switch to real burning software like Nero you will never have a problem like this, or you will very rarely have a problem like this.

If you do decide to upgrade your software, nero has a free trial version by the way, try it and see if you like it, make sure to uninstall the roxio stuff first, then reboot, then you can install a new burning software. If you can't uninstall roxio you have some more serious problems, but hopefully it won't be that bad.
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Ah..... while I agree with everything you said about roxio, I have to disagree with your rec of nero. I have never had any luck with nero on any machine I've ever tried it on.

If the OP finds nero good, that's wonderful. If not, he could try NTI CD Maker (which is what I use, it's smart, fast, and NEVER acts stupid), or as posted on another forum I frequent, cdburnerxp which regardless the name is good for other versions of windows as well....
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I'm curious, what kinds of problems have you had with Nero? I've been using that for years with almost zero issues. One thing I will definitely agree on, it's not intuitive to setup, but once setup correctly it's like a swiss watch, its burning engine is amazingly well written, I've gotten it to work consistently on machines so old they shouldn't have been able to burn at all, 300 megahertz units, and not only burn well, but burn at full speed, 52x, with old slow hard drives.

However, it does need to be setup correctly, there's a lot of configuration options which need to be done right, like where the image is stored compared to where the temp burning files are stored.

And some other issues, changing burners has always been a tricky area with Nero, takes some figuring out how to make it recognize the new unit, I think that may have been fixed in 6 finally if I remember right. Also Nero didn't support low quality CD rom units very well, I talked their tech support quite a bit about that issue, but then finally just stopped using the cd rom to cd burner method completely, and never had any more failure barring the odd exception you'll always get due to bad cd blanks or whatever.

Nero is simply amazing at being able to take a severely damaged, completely unplayable, scratched cd, and recreate the audio with only a few skips here and there, it's low level error correction is to me stunningly well made, though it's interface is not the most user friendly, but I've found that once you get used to it, and it's been properly setup, users will not want to use another product for any reason, it's that good.

Good to get other burning recommendations however, I'd tend to believe that basically all real burning software is better than Roxio, Roxio is simply the worst product perhaps ever written for the windows platform. Back when they were with Adaptec, Roxio EZ CD creator had massive issues with Windows 2000, their website was filled with documentation of the issues, which were severe, including total toasting of the OS to the standard burn failures that fully locked up the OS this poster experienced.
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Oh lord, I don't even know what all now. I had a Sony CDRW that worked okay with ROXIO no less, but too slow to really use it (OLD SLOW MACHINE), so was advised to start over with nero. Did so (can't remember which version now), and discovered that it refused to burn CDRs at all, and wouldn't produce a rewriteable that any drive but the one which burned it could read.

My new machine came with not only nero of whichever version was current 2 years ago, but of course with WinXPPro's "built-in" (which btw according to my MS techie friend is NERO, not roxio!) - NEITHER of which worked at all on the cheap CDRW which Systemax installs as default (and which I had them replace twice because it was cr#p - was under warranty so why not? - but have now replaced on my own a Sony DVD/CDRW combo).

Also a lot of stop-in-the-middle-disc-is-now-trash problems IIRC. In any case, I found NTI CD Maker, and I am one happy camper. This is one of those "to each hisser own" things, I think. One uses what one finds USABLE, y'know?
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Tell your friend that unless XP changed burning drivers, he's not right, I've been at the guy's office in Redmond campus that MS hired from Adaptec to do their XP burning driver.

I think you have found the one weakness of Nero, it doesn't work well with low quality units, although that doesn't translate to 'cheap', just technically low quality. That's the same issue I had with my no name cdrom forcing failures when doing disk to disk copying.

You're definitely right, you have to find what works for you, but if you are using decent quality burners, man, nero is the stuff, you'd be amazed at the performance I've gotten out of it on old machines. But I haven't tried the one you recommend so I'll make exactly zero comments on that...
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thanks...trust me: this drive has no such hole...my other non-burner drive does....such is my luck...

PC was on 2000 professional and slowed to a crawl, new tech put in XP and the roxio stuff....burner had been fine before...used little.

For all I know, it may have burned stuff fine and done as I asked but, won't give me the disc, so I really don't know.
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That type of lockup is completely symptomatic of roxio full on crash. I've heard of some cdrom units that don't have the hole, that's unfortunate to say the least.

You might try rebooting into Windows using F8 on boot, then selecting safe mode, sometimes that cuts off enough services to let you do what you need, I think it might in this case, just enough to let you open the cdrom unit.

Once you get it open, see if you can uninstall the roxio software. I had this happen to a friend of mine too, with Windows XP, I'd just set him up with it, and he decided to install roxio, and he's completely lost all burning cabability on his machine, would probably require an OS reinstall. Too bad your tech friend decided to solve what was probably a simple spyware/trojan issue on your machine by reinstalling the OS, and replacing it with Windows XP. If he installed XP directly ontop of Windows 2000 don't expect any good news in the future, if it was a clean, reformatted install, and you can get the roxio uninstalled, you might be ok.

But a bad roxio install can be very bad, especially if it was an older version, then it can be downright nasty, that's not a product that should ever have been sold for Windows 2000 or XP.

Good luck
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jmach: try removing the cd drive entirely from your case, then plug it in to a power lead on another machine if you have one available, then try the eject button again. If you don't have another machine available, you might consider a local shop at this point....

jeff - wonder if it depends on WHICH XP you have? Because my laptop with XPHome DEFINITELY has nero, just as my techie friend said. Even has a folder for it.... and not ONE "adaptec" driver to be found.

Digging around in my XPPro install right now, though I'd be surprised to find any of the original cr#p by this time.... you know how I am with my machines/software! Yup, just as I thought, can't find either nero or roxio or anything adaptec on this box....
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Oh, I see, no, you won't see either a nero or an adaptec file or folder, the actual cd burning driver is just going to be some system dll file, it won't be named adaptec or nero, they licensed the product from adaptec, you'll have to trust me on this story, I lost one of my oldest friends over this question, who worked at MS.

What your system came with was nero, is my guess. That would be in addition to the built in cd burning capability [sad as it is] that XP already has in it.

Great advice on the cd rom, I was going to suggest something similar but you beat me to it.
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