Brand new computers at work, right out of the box.......Yuck.

While trying to load a reportwirter program, Cognos, more than half of the machines started having problems. The error common to the machines that won't load the program is a cdrom error, event ID 7, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block.

The kicker is that on one of the machines, a program did successfully install (after many tries) right after all of these errors began ocurring.

Does this sound like a bad drive or is it the disk containing the program?

Any thoughts?

I think that the only time a CD-ROM gets a bad block error...is when it cannot read the CD (CD dirty, damaged, etc.), at least that's the way it is on my systems.

I just checked my Events Viewer log and I have a whole string of that error message, all occurring between 1730 and 1830 on 18 Oct, a time period when I was inserting a ton of CDs to see what the content was or whether they were unused.

So, I don't think there's anything wrong with the optical drives, but your disks probably need cleaning.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/152688-45-block

Louis

As hamluis stated, a bad block is indicative of a bad block of data on the media that's being checked - so the immediate suspect is the physical CD itself. If the problem continues (and you verify that the CD's are good on another machine) then I'd suspect that it was the CD drive itself.