LiteOn DVD Drive oddity

[Pussywillow]

My stepson acquired a LiteOn DvdR RW Drive. It's a couple of years old Model SHW-1635S(36C).

It didn't have the software disk with it, only a copy of PowerDVD which you can pick up anywhere.

I built his machine myself :

Abit board AN7
AMD Athlon XP 2.2
2 X Seagate HDD's (40gig and 80gig Drives C: and F:)
1x Sony CD RW
Windows XP
Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 Graphics card 256mb
768mb RAM

and of course the above DVD Drive.

Trouble is this. I installed the DVD drive - simple enough.
BIOS/Windows recognises it quite rightly as Drive E: It also says it's working properly. It will eject it. The light comes on when you put a disk in.

But try as I might I can't get it to do anything.


It won't recognise anything in the drive at all. I've set the 'region to 2 for the Uk. Got software : PowerDVD, Mediaplayer, Realplayer. Yet nothing but nothing will play in this drive !

I've been onto LiteOn's site and although it's quite good, and gave me drivers (which I shouldn't really need although I have updated them anyway) and the manual there isn't much there to say I'm doing anything (or not doing) anything wrong.

I'm coming to the conclusion that he drive itself may be faulty. Lets face it no-one gives away a working DVDRW drive do they ?

So maybe thats' it.

Before I take it out and tell my stepson it won't work, is there anything I might have missed or any further check that I ought to do ?

Please help somebody it's driving me nuts.

[Sylvander]

"It won't recognise anything in the drive at all"
Try...
1. Booting a bootable CD in the drive at startup. [an EBCD or Knoppix CD would be good]

2. Use some program to browse the files on a CD in the optical drive.
You could use a Startup floppy to do this.
Or...
Personally I'd prefer to use the "File Manager" [FM] run from the FREE bootable EBCD, then swap in another CD and use FM to browse the contents.

3. If you have some optical reader installed in addition to the DVD-RW drive you could run Knoppix in that and use it to access the disk in the DVD drive.

4. 1,2,3 above would tell you whether the DVD-drive hardware was able to read optical disks or not.
e.g. I have a CD-R drive that wouldn't fully/correctly boot a known good bootable EBCD burned to a CD-R disk [surely a CD-R drive can read a CD-R disk?].
When I tried to burn a CD-R using "Ashampoo" within Windows, the virgin/unused/blank CD-R could not be read.
Each tending to confirm the other [that the drive can not read CD-R's].

[Paul Komski]

What types of media have you tried. Retail DVD movies, CD Albums, home-made burned media. Generally speaking the most easily readable media are pressed CDROMs such as a retail Windows Installation CD.

At least try blowing any dust out of the drive and of using a lens cleaner.

[Sylvander]

I replaced my CD-R with a new DVD-RW and it's working just fine. :D :cool:

Seems like the CD-R is faulty; perhaps your optical drive is similarly faulty. :(

Try a replacement that's known to be fully functional. :)