Help: dvddrive fails to read discs .

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i have a liteon dvd/cd burner, today it wo'nt read any cd audio or dvd movies.
xp detects hardware as ok, but autoplay fails to come up when i insert these types of discs and when i explore the drive, it says it's empty.
i've noticed no probs with drive at all until today....

please advise.
 
i'll try that .
but i forgot to say that i recently changed my nvidia graphics certified driver to the latest beta drive (for half-life 2 eps 2) would that have messed things up with my dvd drive ?

can't think of anything else that i've recently done.
 
shouldn't have done. Try uninstalling it and reinstalling it device manager. If when you try to reinstall it it fails it will mean your driver is corrupt.
In that case you have two options, try to find one online or try to use the XP one.
At work this happened and we ended up formatting the PC as it wouldnt let us install *** drivers for it (said no compatable hardware) and xp pretended it only had a cd driver and not a dvd one lol....tried 4 different drives ffs.
 
Tried uninstalling hardware and driver , device is recognised but still fails to read discs and write blanks.

will try data cable option this morning.
if that fails ???
 
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Hmmm I wonder if the drive is on its way out? I know of a couple of drives that stopped working on DVDs but worked fine on games (happens on PS2s as well).
Just a thought, could be wrong. Have you got another DVDRW to try to help narrow it down to that particular drive? Or maybe try that drive in another PC. Just an easy way to narrow things down I find.
 
havent read all the thread but was it working fine in the first place ? are you sure it wasnt on its way out anyway ?


did it just stop working after the driver change ? is it possible you inserted a disc that was on a sticky/dirty surface and inserted that into the tray and now that sticky stuff is preventing any discs inserted from spinning ?

check the tray is clean and wipe it down ...also try different discs.
 
was working ok before change of graphics card drivers.
no other pc i can swap dvd/cd driver into.
run panda on-line scanner and using Nod 32 anti-virus checkers, showed no probs.
bbbbbbut recently i used Zone alarm suite trial, it was showing up a non specific boot virus, but both panda and nod32 showed nothing, i put this down to a conflict of runing 2 anti-virus progs together.

will check bios for boot option- thanks for your replies all.

edit--------
------------
copied and pasted from when i posted in windows sub-forum-
boot check is enabled for virus.
drive has shown no probs at all, until now.

"scan results>
just says 2 entries with the exact same name*Type_boot*, abs no more info given by z/a,
they are both in my boot drive> my doc/settings folder.

when i do a search nowt comes up.

when i click on the files in the z/alarm scan results, it then shows a kapersky webpage saying it cannot find anything on the tytpe_boot virus/viri.
int the box at the bottom of the scan ie *details* box, no further info is supplied on the detected files.

z/a says treatment has failed and suggest >delete virus on re-boot.
"
 
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If it fails to read discs then it's possible the laser is either weak, dirty or damaged hence why the interface side shows up fine in XP but it can't read discs.

I've usually been able to get drives going again buy taking the top off and gently cleaning the laser eye with meths and a cotton bud.

TBH though, sounds like the drive is on it's way out or has already failed. I wouldn't trust any discs burned with it.

New ones are very cheap these days.

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