DVD-ROM clicks, then PC freezes. HELP!
 

For the last month I've been having an odd problem. My DVD-ROM drive will click, then my PC will freeze up. No mouse activity, and the HDD light will be on. Nothing is in the DVD drive, no programs are running that should be trying to access it. The machine can be completely idle with no applications running and it will happen.

I have one IDE hard drive on the primary interface.
I have a CDRW as master and the DVD-ROM as slave on the secondary interface.

Anyone run into this before, or have any suggestions?

Is it a mechanical click (ie, something physical), or is it something else?

Yeah, it sounds like some mechanism starts to move in the drive.

my first suggestion/question with most all tech support Qs is

what's your OS?

....and, you say 'no apps are accessing..etc'...
does this mean you've clearly identified all procs in your taskmanager/proc viewer?

Bad drive it sounds like. When we say bad we simply means that some rare fault or error has developed in the hardware that makes it do something stupid that freezes your computer. Fixing hardware that has gone bad usually isn't possible/cost-effective so your best off replacing it.

Are you sure it's the DVD drive and not the hard drive? You can check by unplugging the IDE (or whatever you rich folks use) cable going into the drive and then running the computer for a while. If there are no problems with it unplugged then you should replace the drive.

Its Windows 2000 on this particular machine. I plan on trying to unhook the DVD drive and seeing what happens.

I know all of the software on the machine (and the processes). In fact, I have reloaded the OS from scrach since the problem has started, and it hasn't changed anything.

Its so hit and miss that I can go a week or two without it happening, then have it happen three times in a day. Going without the drive for over a week will be hard.

One thing that crossed my mind is that it could possibly be the power supply. This machine is pretty loaded. However, I have removed a 30Gb IDE hard drive recently and it still will lock occasionally.