I keep losing DVD drive D:

[Vital Signs]

Greetings all. My first post/question. I am a business programmer of 24 years and by no means an OS/Hardware guru, so you young techies please give me a hand here. I have already formatted my hard drive and reinstalled XP Pro (I needed to anyway). On to my predicament,... when I place a DVD in my D: drive and activate PowerDVD I get the message no disc in D: After many days of messing with the DVD tools and Windows devices, I placed my old DVD player in the computer, rebooted (found new hardware, etc) I still have the same problem. But when I place my current DVD player back in the drive (found new hardware, blah blah blah) I can actually play a DVD,... but only once. If I wish to watch another DVD, I have to go through the hassle of shutting down, placing my old DVD player back in, shutting down again, and then replace my current DVD player.

Somebody please tell me what the heck is going on and give me a possible solution. I don't have any hair on my head to pull out, so I may resort to drinking! Many thanks in advance.

 

[Snake91839]

Are the jumpers set correctly. Do you have conflicting masters or slaves?

Simple, but that would do it.

 

[Vital Signs]

Jumper is set at master. BTW,.. I have already experimented with the other jumper settings.

Thanks!

 

[Snake91839]

Ok, . I figured that you would have already checked, but I was just checking. So the old DVD player doesn't work, but after plugging that one in, and then plugging in the new one, that causes the new one to work? Weird.

So, I'm assuming that since it goes through finding the new hardware, it assigns drivers and it's recognized in device manager? If that's the case, I would try updating the drivers, however, it should already have the latest.

Since it says it can't find a DVD in drive D:, it clearly recognizes the DVD player, but it sounds more like the DVD player doesn't recognize the DVD, which is then a hardware problem of the DVD player, not your computer.

I guess another thing is have you tried a different IDE slot on your motherboard? Don't think that would be it, but it's worth a shot

Hope some of that helped

 

[Vital Signs]

You got it right, Snake!

A little more info,...

I can play music CDs and access data CDs with no problems. But if I insert a DVD disc in the drive and activate Windows Explorer, click on D: CD/DVD Drive, it does not show the DVD files. I have to do a DVD Player swap, and then swap them again to play a movie or concert. After playing one DVD, I have to do the swap thing all over again. I am using XP Professional Multi-User Edition. I have also formatted the hard drive and installed XP Home Edition, but still the same results.

In the past I have used both DVD players with PowerDVD or Nero Showtime without any problems. But now this issue occurs regardless which software I use. And no, I do not have both softwares installed, so this is not a conflicting DLL issue. But regardless wether I have both softwares installed or not, I have to do the DVD player swap.

This is also not a virus issue.

 

[superdave1984]

This may be reaching here, but is it possible your IDE cable is bad? Do you have another one to try? When you swap the drive, do you get a BIOS message before boot?

 

[Vital Signs]

No BIOS message on the boots, but will try another cable.

Thanks!

Using a new IDE cable, but still wants me to do the DVD player swap.

 

[KSoD]

Have you updated the firmware on the player at all? Have you set region coding? How old is the player and how muc use has it gotten over that time.

I know i ahve had DVD players and burners go on me in just a few months when i backed up my entried DVD collection. That was well over 700 Movies that they both had read/burned adn the drives were jsut dead since they got extensive amount of use.

This issues sound like the one i had with a Burner before and hte only resolution i had. Replace it.

 

[Vital Signs]

I have another computer at my house. It belongs to a girl I work with and I am doing some work on it for her. I know her DVD player is working okay. I will rape her (computer) and see how things work.

The computer rape went well. I installed her DVD player on my computer, stopped and started PowerDVD many times, rebooted my computer many times, changed DVDs many times, and everything works great. I can't believe I have two bad DVD players. It seems that CD ROMS last forever, but DVD players have a limited life span.

Thanks to the members here who have contributed to this thread,... and a special <snipped> thanks to the DVD manufacturers of Corporate America.

 

[KSoD]

I can understand the frustration. But i do not think it is that way. CD Roms do not have to burn as much information. A CD is 700MB compared to a DVD 4.7GB or 8.5GB. So burning a spindle of 50 DVD is like burning almost 335 CD's. A big difference.

Also please refrain from the swearing. We have a Zero Tolerance Policy in effect here. Thank you.