DVD Drives not working at all...PLEASE HELP!!

[Nub Wagon]

Hey all, new member here. Have a puzzling one for you all...

For some unknown reason, neither of my DVD drives are working at all. Just as an FYI, I currently have a Sony DDU1621 DVD-ROM drive and an LG GSA-4040B DVD writer. The first drive to die was the Sony which was about a week ago. Yesterday, my LG writer seemed to be knocked out as well. I had tried several different types of media in it (DVD movie, Doom 3 CD, Windows XP CD) and none of them worked. I opened explorer to view the contents of the discs and they all came up as nothing. It recognizes that there's a disc in the drive (no "please insert a disc into drive" message) but cannot read it. I had downloaded & installed the LG firmware drivers to see if that would fix the problem, but it did not. I have tried pretty much everything I can think of to get them to work again, but to no avail. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

 

[Nubius]

Well....the only thing I can do is shed some light on it with that same experience....the drive was technically working but I guess the motor or something just gives out. Because you'd hear it trying to work, but wouldn't read a CD. It seems to me that they've simply died but that would be some very horrible timing to die within the same week like that. Could PSU is goin out of whack and fried it? Not entirely sure. Wait for a couple more replies

 

[Nub Wagon]

Ok, still waiting for more replies...

In the meantime, it may help if I post some system specs and some additional information:

System specs are as follows:

-P4 3Gig CPU
-Asus P4C800-E Motherboard
-512MB RAM
-80GB WD HD
-Asus GeForce FX5700
-Sony DDU1621 DVD-ROM
-LG GSA-4040B DVD-RAM
-Windows XP Pro (SP1)

I have already checked both Sony's & LG's sites for drivers or firmware. Sony doesn't have anything but LG had firmware drivers. I downloaded & installed them and still could not get it to work. I also replaced the IDE cable with a brand new one. Still nothing. I called LG's tech support today & they recommended to flash the BIOS on my motherboard to see if that would work. After I flashed & rebooted, I inserted my Doom 3 CD & it actually worked! I then tried to play a DVD & nothing happened. I then tried to insert the Doom 3 CD again & it didn't work.

I'm thinking that somehting might be messed up with my Patin-Couffin driver for my DVD players. Anyone have any experience with this? Would it cause my drives to fail completely like this? If all else fails & I can't resolve this issue, I'm going to reinstall Windows. I have a suspicion that the drives will work if I try to reinstall because they show up in both the BIOS and Windows. I'm pretty sure that it's a problem with Windows and not the drives themselves.

 

[Harper]

Strange. As the only thing that really goes wrong with optical drives are hardware faults.

Could be dust. Does your PC attract a lot of dust?

 

[quartz01]

i had the same problem when i upgraded (not clean installed) windows xp over windows ME. it happens when you upgrade from 98 or ME to XP. I had to delete two files and it worked. Don't remember the exact site but it was from the public HP/Compaq support center. you should find it there if you look hard enough

 

[zerozero]

Before reinstalling, try and delete the drivers for both drives and let windows redetect and install a fresh set. This might solve it.

 

[vance43211]

try deleting the ide drivers too, and let windows redetect and install a fresh set

 

[Nub Wagon]

Ok, I have just tried uninstalling the IDE drivers in Device Manager. I had uninstalled the Secondary IDE Channel since that is the channel my DVD drive is on (LG). After I rebooted, it reinstalled the LG DVD drive and the Secondary IDE Channel ok. For some reason, it also tried to install a RAID Controller which I don't have. Anyway, I then tried to insert a DVD movie to see if it would read. Nothing. I then tried to insert my Doom 3 CD to see if it would read. The drive was active for about 30 seconds trying to read the disk. Then an error message came up mentioning something about a partial readerror and partial writeerror. I should have taken a screenshot but forgot to. I then tried opening up explorer to see if it would read the contents. The Doom 3 label was on the LG drive and when I clicked on the drive, nothing happened. The drive kept trying to read the disk but nothing would show in the right pane. I then closed explorer, opened the LG drive and closed it again with the Doom 3 CD in it. This time when I went into explorer, it didn't read anything at all. So now I'm back to where I started again.

I can't help but think that there's something messed up with my windows for something like this to happen. I mean my BIOS sees the LG drive, windows sees the drive but won't read from it except for a few short periods of time after I do something dramatic to my system. I am running out of possible fixes to this problem. Any other suggestions? Thanks.

 

[zerozero]

Have you checked your connection to make sure everything is hooked on ok? How about your jumpers for master and slave? If everything fails, try a windows repair. Unplug one and connect only one on your IDE channel (don't forget to set as master) and see if one of them is driving the other one down.

 

[Inaris]

just curous, but what burning software are you using? I know of an issue that plauges Roxio driven systems, but might not be the case for this one...