Hi,

A friend of mine has this problem where he cant read any media through his DVD-ROM drive, and his DVD-R Drive. The 2 drives are recognized by windoze as functioning properly but when you try to open the DVD drive when it has media in it, it says seomthing along the lines of "function not recogized" and when you try to open the DVD-R Drive it opens in explorer, but contains nothing. Sometimes these drives sporatically work and the problem seems if it is gone, but within minutes it is back again. The problem can also be corrected for a few minutes by reinstalling the drivers. Also He can burn CDs with the drive, but not DVDs.

I myself have tried booting up Knoppix (a bootable linux distrobution) and the DVD Drive Drive works fine, so that rules out any type of hardware failure. But, the DVD-R drive failes to be recognized. I have alkso opened the case to check the connetions to both the drives, and to the Motherboard.

My friend has tried all of the windows troubleshooting advice, and has reinstalled the drivers many times. Normally after booting, Windows will not recognize any form of media inserted into the drive. However, after unsintalling the driver, and rebooting, he has been able to import Audio CDs through iTunes. However, iTunes does not recognize the disc, he has to tell it to add the folder, and it somehow imports the songs without displaying the fact that it is doing so.

The Specs on this COmputer are:

P4 2.53ghz
Nvidia GeForce4 MX graphics
256mb ram
60gig Natsushia HDD
NEC DVD+RW ND-1100A DRIVE
Samsung DVD-ROM SD-616T DRIVE
WIndoze XP Home SP-1

Any help would be mighty fine

-The Bumstedman




EDIT: also the CTRL+ALT+DELETE menu dosent work (dosent popup) but if you look closely at the system tray, it opens and then closes within less than a second. We have tried using all of the major spyware scannera, and macafee virus scanner (fully updated)

The only way I managed around a similiar problem like that was re-installing windows after I installed CloneCD and it had created virtual drives and removed my real ones, I tried everything, re-installing their drivers wokred but said they were corrupt

well, this version of windows is a brand new- never copied one, so, that cant be the case

wurgle Reinstalling Windows is a last resort only around here. Sometimes it becomes necessary, but not often and we try everything we can think of first, and sometimes that includes some really off-the-wall stuff...(even I can hardly believe some of the things these guys can come up with...and I don't mean that in a derogatory manner...)

OK the first thing I think, is to boot into Safe Mode and completely remove all CD/DVD drives from Device Manager. If necessary, remove the IDE controllers as well, but usually that isn't necessary. Reboot, Windows should re-install the drives and you can check it to see if they work.

Also check the IDE cable, a bad cable can cause all sorts of strange problems. While you have it open, also check the jumpers, CD/DVD drives are unpredictable, some work great set to Master/Slave, some work better set to Cable Select.

ok, thanks alot, I'll tell my friend to do that when he gets back from vaca.

Also, does anybody knwo anything about that CTRL+ALT+DEL problem??? (refer to the last line of the 1st post)


-The Bumstedman