Windows 7 Another 'not working DVD+/- RW'

Tsukiyomi

New Member
So here's yet another addition to what seems to be an ever-growing list of drives behaving badly.

I've got two DVD drives, neither of which are working properly in 7, the main one being a Lite On (Atapi DVD A DH16A3L) SATA drive. It's a DVD +/- RW Dual Layer that was working perfectly 2 hours before I installed (upgrade) Windows 7 Ultimate (32bit). The drive is recognising and playing CDs but DVDs aren't showing up when I insert them and I'm getting the popup message to "Insert a Disc" when I click on the drive icon. Oddly enough, I can no longer boot a DVD from the drive on Startup since installing 7.

The drive itself is showing in BIOS, and all seems normal (at least to me) in DiscInfo, although I'm not sure what "Lock Detected" means or whether it's relevant.
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I've already tried disabling Integrity Checks, I don't have Upper or Lower Filters, uninstalled Nero 9 and PowerDVD 9, don't have iTunes or anything like that. I've also removed the drive (both physically and by uninstalling in Device Manager) and had no luck with either. I also ran WinASO Optimizer after removing hardware & software but to no avail.

I've also tried to put in a working second +RW drive (this one an IDE drive) from a machine running XP that's doing exactly the same thing in 7, i.e. not recognising DVDs but playing CDs. I spent the last three hours reinstalling 7 but nothing's changed.

I'm stumped and would appreciate any help. Thanks in advance. :confused:
 
Hi Tsukiyomi,
have you found a solution to your problem? I installed W7 and I am having the identical problem and no luck so far when trying to find a solution :frown:
 
Nope, I'm still stuck with two DVD drives that think they're CD Players (my second drive has renamed itself from Ricoh DVD RW MP5240 to Rhcnh DVD RV LP4240) so I can't even flash the firmware or update the driver.
 
:) this would be funny if it wasn't so frustrating
So many people have the same problem, but noone has found a solution that would work for me - so I guess I am stuck with CD player and patiently wait for some driver/firmware or some kind of update :(
 
Can I assume you have all checked for an updated version of the firmware for your drives?

How about attaching a snipit of the drivers being used for your drive? Device Manager-Drive-properties-driver-details
 
Can I assume you have all checked for an updated version of the firmware for your drives?

How about attaching a snipit of the drivers being used for your drive? Device Manager-Drive-properties-driver-details

You assume correctly :) The only thing I've found (from Compaq) is for older operating systems and won't do anything on my Win 7. The driver that's showing is the generic c:\windows\system32\DRIVERS\cdrom.sys
 
This may sound like a dumb question but how old are the DVD drives?
Also have you tried different drives? Do you know anyone that has one you can borrow to test?
DVD drives are like really cheap you can get one from newegg for around 25 bux.
 
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This may sound like a dumb question but how old are the DVD drives?
Also have you tried different drives? Do you know anyone that has one you can borrow one from to test?
DVD drives are like really cheap you can get one from newegg for around 25 bux.

It's not dumb - my main drive (Lite On Atapi DVD A DH16A3L) came with the computer (Compaq SR5310F) 19 months ago. As I said previously, the drive was working as normal - reading/burning DVD+/- R/RW, original DVD movies and CD-R, CD-RW. The last time I burned a DVD was 2 hours or so before installing Windows 7. Once I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 the DVD functionality stopped and it's now only working as a CD Player.

I added a second drive, Ricoh DVD+RW MP5240A that's maybe five years old. That one is playing movies and might well burn DVD's - I'm not sure because I ran out of DVD+R's in favour of the -R's that my #1 drive had been using. The Ricoh was working perfectly in an older XP machine (which has since been taken apart)
 
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I understand that it worked in Vista but was just curious about it's age that "maybe" it might have been older and not supported by Win7. But if it's less than 2yrs old you should be OK. I would definitely try a newer one for the hellofit.

jus my 2 centz :rolleyes:
 
I checked the driver for my DVD and show the same as you with just the 1 driver.

Maybe we should check the IDE controller in Device Manager to see if something might be missing there. Have you updated any chipset drivers for your system? Attached are some of the IDE controller settings you might check to see if you have the same drivers as I in Device Manager. I do have a SATA DVD drive.
 
I checked the driver for my DVD and show the same as you with just the 1 driver.

Maybe we should check the IDE controller in Device Manager to see if something might be missing there. Have you updated any chipset drivers for your system? Attached are some of the IDE controller settings you might check to see if you have the same drivers as I in Device Manager. I do have a SATA DVD drive.

Saltgrass, thanks for being so helpful with this. I checked my drivers and they're exactly the same as yours. What's different for me though is the following:

2lke51j.jpg


I've no idea whether it's normal to have two of each ATA channel there. The First and third entries under IDE/ATA look like this:

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As you can see, there's just the one Target ID - the same for both IDE/ATA entries. Entries 1 and 3 have blank Advanced Settings, although all four IDE/ATA entries are showing the same drivers as yours. I'm not too sure about all of this, so I'm guessing those other two entries (the extra ATA Channel 0 and ATA Channel 1) are supposed to be there because I've tried to uninstall them but a scan for hardware changes/system reboot brings them back. :confused:

Oh and as an extra little bit of info, I did successfully burn a CD on the main DVD drive last night, although it's still asking me to Insert a Disc when there's a DVD in there (even an original movie DVD)
 
I show 3 each of 0 and 1 controllers, which is probably related to how many motherboard ports you have.

Have you tried running msinfo32. exe and checked for problem devices? Check the Components section for CD-ROM to see if things look OK there, then check the problem devices section. Look around to see if anything else looks strange.

Something I might do, which may seem strange so use you own best judgement, would be to find an MS-DOS boot disk. The ones we used to run fdisk and other things. I would try booting the machine from that and select start with CD-ROM support. You don't have to do anything else, just let it set up the DVD. Maybe somehow this would reset your drive and allow it to work normally in other situations.

I haven't found anything else to even try, unless uninstalling the drive in Device Manager and letting Windows reinstall it.
 
I show 3 each of 0 and 1 controllers, which is probably related to how many motherboard ports you have.

Have you tried running msinfo32. exe and checked for problem devices? Check the Components section for CD-ROM to see if things look OK there, then check the problem devices section. Look around to see if anything else looks strange.

Something I might do, which may seem strange so use you own best judgement, would be to find an MS-DOS boot disk. The ones we used to run fdisk and other things. I would try booting the machine from that and select start with CD-ROM support. You don't have to do anything else, just let it set up the DVD. Maybe somehow this would reset your drive and allow it to work normally in other situations.

I haven't found anything else to even try, unless uninstalling the drive in Device Manager and letting Windows reinstall it.

I don't have a floppy drive so that's going to throw me I suppose (I can't very well make a boot disk on CD if I'm trying to get the drive recognised can I?)

Something of note here though - although the drive is recognised in BIOS (and my 'second' DVD drive, the Ricoh, isn't, even though that will play DVD's within Windows 7), I can't boot from it. I tried to boot up Knoppix to see what the drive does there, but although the drive light came on but my PC went into Windows as normal.
 
Ok, two months later and yesterday I picked up an LG GH22 Super Multi DVD ReWriter. It's an IDE drive where my last (non-working) drive was SATA and specifically says it's Windows 7 compatible on the box. Coincidentally, the second drive (Ricoh) was also IDE. Anyway, I hooked it up, installed the driver from the included disc and it works like a charm now. So I've no idea whether it was the DVD drive itself or the fact that Win7 didn't like a SATA DVD drive, but just wanted to provide this update.

Thanks to all who gave their help.
 
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