Problems Writing To An Optical Drive; Hard Drive Problems - Dell OptiPlex 160 Service Manual

Clean the drive or disc — use commercially available disc cleaning materials to ensure the disc and optical drive are clean.
Run the Hardware Troubleshooter —
Run the Dell Diagnostics — See Dell
Optical drive problems (optional, external)
NOTE: High-speed optical drive vibration is normal and may cause noise, which does not indicate a defect in the drive or the media.
NOTE: Because of different regions worldwide and different disc formats, not all DVD titles work in all DVD drives.
Adjust the Windows volume control —
Click the speaker icon in the lower-right corner of your screen.
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Ensure that the volume is turned up by clicking the slidebar and dragging it up.
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Ensure that the sound is not muted by clicking any boxes that are checked.
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Check the speakers — See Sound and Speaker

Problems writing to an optical drive

Close other programs —
The optical drive must receive a steady stream of data during the writing process. If the stream is interrupted, an error occurs. Try
closing all programs before you write to the optical drive.
Turn off standby mode in Windows before writing to a disc —
management modes.

Hard drive problems

Run Check Disk —
Windows XP Extended:
1. Log in to the system as a user with administrative privileges.
2. Right-click the Start button, and click Explore.
3. In the Folders list, right-click the disk you want to check (OS(C:), or OS(D:), or etc.) and click Properties.
4. Click Tools® Check Now.
5. Click Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors and click Start.
6. If a disk problem is found, follow the screen instructions to fix the problem.
Windows XP:
1. Click Start and click My Computer.
2. Right-click Local Disk C:.
3. Click Properties® Tools® Check Now.
4. Click Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors and then click Start.
See Hardware Troubleshooter.
Diagnostics.
Problems.
Search for the keyword standby in Windows Help and Support for information on power