DVD Drive Woes

General Forums Off-topic Chat
#1

Hey guys. I’ve been having major problems with my current DVD drive and I was wondering if you guys had any ideas on how to fix it.

Symptoms:

  1. Is hit-and-miss on playing CDs. (Works sometimes, other times you have to take the CD out and reinsert it to get it to work)

  2. Will hardly ever play DVD movies.

  3. When booting Knoppix Live CDs and DVDs it gives me errors about the disks (Which I had tried previously without any errors whatsoever.) something about missing files. (I know my discs are okay b/c I used them to install Knoppix on a different PC.)

I’m running Windows XP, AMD Athlon 3000 + Barton, 1 GB PC-3200 Kingston RAM, 80 GB WD HD, Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS Gamer, and of course this Sony DVD drive.

I’ve tried different IDE cables without success.

Any ideas? My thoughts are it’s either the DVD drive or my motherboard. :-?

Thanks in advance.:slight_smile:

DwarvenFury

#2

you know, i had almost the same symptoms a few months ago with my cd/rw drive: it would only play cd roms and store bought cd’s - but not burned disks. so after almost giving in and buying a new drive, i took it apart and sprayed the dust out with a can of air, cleaned the lens off real good and it works fine now. you might want to try that, unless it’s still under warranty.

#3

Did it come with its own CD? Perhaps it needs the right drivers or something. :-?

#4

yeah my DVD drive was similar… but onyl with two DVD’s

i had been hiring DVDs and all had been working fine. these were old releases… but NONE of the new release DVDs would work whatsoever. they would work perhaps 1 out of 20 times i inserted them, once it read them to start with i could watch the rest.

hired some old DVD’s the next day (all scratched and stuff) and it worked fine.

my theory is its a new copy protection that did it. its very very annoying and a waste of my time, i am hiring DVD’s not copying the buggers.

Alltaken

#5

On my DVD writer drive I initially had some problems with it reading CDs and DVDs. After searching around the Dell site I eventually found a firmware fix from the manufacturer that adjusts the focus of the laser. I haven’t had any problems since. The worst part was that I had to find the fix myself, as none of the Dell help desk people knew anything about it. Nice.

#6

Wiggie: No, it didn’t come with a driver CD. :-?

A few other oddities:

With my current DVD drive and also with an older CD drive that I’ve plugged in, Knoppix from a CD boots with these weird errors. It comes up with the OS eventually, but when I did a Debian Install, the Konsole kept popping up with all of these errors, and when I try to boot into my Knoppix HD install it has all of these warning and error messages about missing files.:-?

I’ve tried different IDE cables, so I don’t think that’s the problem. Could it be a motherboard problem, maybe? I still haven’t ruled out the possibility of it being a DVD or CD drive problem. :-?

Anyone else have any thoughts?

Thanks for the help so far.:slight_smile:

DwarvenFury