I am running vista home premium. Vista tries to format any disk I put in my cd/dvd-rw, regardless of what is on it. this is getting very tiresom. I can't get any disk to auto run either. they only way I can get anything accomplished is if I right click on the drive, copy and paste to a folder and look up the autorin file in the folder. Someone please hlep me.

go to start control pannel and then autoplay make sure these settings are correct you might have changed them or if you have programs like deamon tools or nero installed they will change them for u during the install for example deamon tools disables cd/dvd autorun

I initially thought that was the issue too, so I reset all tabs in auto play to thier defaults, that didn't work, I set the software and games tab to "install or run program". Vista still tries to format any disk I put in my Drive. I also tried changing my CD/DVD-RW too. I went from an NEC to a PLEXTOR drive. That had no positive change either. However I can use programs like Windows Media Player and Center and my DVD ripping software works fine. It is just when I want a disk to auto run.

Thanks for the help. I did try what you recommended. still no joy, I can't autorun and anytime I try to open a disk from "My computer" Vista treats it like a blank disk and want to format.

thats very weird its obviously not hardware as you have swapped the drive, its not the auto play im honestly stumped i have never come across this before.

My advice would be to reinstall, on a different partition or on another hdd just install a second copy to see if it fixes the problem if it doesnt then i wld suggest u ring microsfot (err i hate saying that).

IF the new version does work it may have been an update u have installed or a corrupt file in the windows folder.

So try downloading updates one at a time and see if they make the problem reappear if one does then go back to your old vista and uninstall it and format the partiton with the newer copy of vista installed but if it isnt an update you might have to use the reinstalled version and ditch the old version.

unless anyone else has heard of this problem i did google it and didnt get any relevant results!

I might try a reinstall. Can I do this without wiping out all my programs and data?

yer if you have another hard disk or you have enough space to make a seperate partition you can run the two in parelle and try and do a bit of fault finding if you do want to do a clean install but keep your programs you will have to insert your vista disk and select upgrade. However take a backup of all your data or put it in a sperate partition becuase if the install fails then it will make it harder to retrieve your data. If you have the space i would strongly suggest trying two installs of vista then you can be for sure it is software causeing the fault!

After trying numerous attempst to fix this issue I finally got fed up and did a clean install of vista. the drive works now. So much for an easy fix! Oh well.

I had this same problem after installing a new upgrade version of Vista. The driver started working after I activated windows.