Weird problem caused by DVDShrink

[bevills1]

This past Sunday I made the mistake of opening DVD burner to remove a disc while DVDShrink was processing DVDFabDecrypter files on the hard drive. As soon as DVD burner opened the system rebooted after which all drives past the second letter drive was gone from the extended DOS partition. Luckily I had backup of all irreplaceable data, but more than a little time was required to repartition, reformat and restore data to those newly created drives. Has anybody else experienced such odd behavior with DVDShrink?

[greymalkin]

How did you determine the problem was caused by DVD Shrink? It was opening the DVD drive that caused the reboot according to your description.

[bevills1]

The drive's been opened dozens of times before with no reboot, and this instance with DVDShrink running is the sole instance of reboot when DVD burner was opened.

[Abbadon]

It could be possible that the application corrupted certain areas of the hard disc, even the reboot itself could have caused this, why?, I have no idea, but Windows access the hard disk everytime I open a CD/DVD drive.

Have you considered running a scan disk?

[bevills1]

What ever the reason is, this should be a warning or reminder how important data backup can be. Who knows what other unforeseen weird things might cause similar problems and data loss?

[VegasBud]

If DvdShrink was processing files on the hard drive, it has no connection with a dvd drive, so the two circumstances were just coincidental. Given that DvdShrink has been used by herds of people for many years, certainly many people have removed a dvd during processing without any other reports of it causing a system crash.

Just to make sure, I put dvds into the drives on win98se, wimMe, and winXP computers, started DvdShrink processing, and then repeatedly ejected the dvds and inserted a different one on each computer. There were no problems on any computer. DvdShrink just kept processing, oblivious to what I was doing.

[bevills1]

I'm running Windows 2000, but I doubt that would be significantly different from XP. This leads me to believe my reboot problem might be related to chipset of my particular mobo according to VegasBud results unless it could be due to my instance being very near the end of DVDShrink processing. In this instance it was within 1 minute 20 seconds complete which might have involved some DVDShrink closing processes that may or may not cause a reboot and other problems.

[VegasBud]

bevills1,

I researched the problem as much as I had time for, and there are indeed other people that have experienced your problem with DvdShrink, but the solutions found include a variety of things which are all outside of DvdShrink. Overheating, faulty memory, bad drivers, and conflicts with poorly written software seem to be the most common causes.

The situation you describe, where the reboot occurred near the end of the DvdShrink processing would logically move overheating or faulty memory to the top of the list of likely suspects.

If this is a recurring problem, this page will show you how to change the crash behaviour of win2000 from automatically rebooting to logging the event, which might give you a better idea of what happened, and what the cause is.