dvd drive will install from cds but not dvds

[Aquilonian]

My dvd player is roughly 7 years old, and it's worked perfectly for those 7 years until recently when pc games started going onto dvds. I could install from cds all day long, but now it wont install from s dvd. I can open the dvd and explore the contents, even copy most of the material onto my harddrive, but the dvd drive still wont run the install program. The actual drive was made by Afreey in 1999, I looked for drivers but can't find anything.

One thing I noticed was if I open my device manager, it says 6x dvd, but in my computer, there are two icons for cd drives... I've tried uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling from the windows universal drivers but it won't show me just the 1 dvd drive. I disconnected my cd burner completely and removed its software.

windows xp
athlon 64 3200
radeon x700
sound blaster audigy 2
1.5g ram

 

[SYL\X/3K]

My dvd player is roughly 7 years old

Im guessing your trying to say DVD drive?

have you installed any themes for your system?

 

[Capricorn]

If I recall correctly, a DVD/CD combo drive has two lasers - one for DVD media and one for CD media. See this article (about 1/2 way down). One of those two lasers may have died or gone out of adjustment. 7 years is an outstanding life for a DVD or even just a plain CD ROM drive. I'd say it's time to spend the $40 for a new DVD-RW from NewEgg.

 

[bmxfreakrider]

yea i would say upgrade, i got this excellent maddog multimedia 18x dvd ram drive, and i love it.