Good news. My optical drive seems to be okay. I thought I'd test it by inserting a blank disk. Writing a file to it. Then opening the file from the disk. All those steps worked fine. Is it possible that the problem before during attempts to boot from disk had to do with the bad avast drivers still on my laptop? or might something have been wrong with this recovery disk? I did insert it into my desktop - and the desktop saw the files?
(On another note, I tried getting the newest drivers from the intel wireless adapter on another laptop. It's a thinkpad xp, sp3. I found the new driver, downloaded it but can't figure out how to install it. Trying the methods we used to get the driver on my work laptop (windows 7) did not work. Is this thread a reasonable place to post this question - or should I start another thread. (that thinkpad has issues - so perhaps I should start a new thread. If so, where? it needs updated drivers, and it's incredibly slow, and runs quite hot).
On another note, I googled Avast drivers causing crashes on windows computers - and see quite a bit on the Avast forums.
Thank you.
Lynn.
