PC does not recognizes DVDRW anymore

[bohemian]

I have had the LiteOn-LDW 411S DVD/RW on my PC for about a year now and it has worked well, but suddenly my PC does not recognize it as a DVD/RW drive. If I use DVD+R media (the bulk of my supply) it does not recognize that blank media has been inserted and identifies the DVD drive as a CD-ROM drive. Sometimes, it will stop recognizing the DVD drive all together. In fact, both of my PCs have done this. Just recently (this evening) I purchased another DVDRW drive (Pioneer A08XL) with the hope of it just being a problem with the LiteOn device, but I'm getting the same problem. When both devices use DVD+RW media the PC will properly recognize it as a DVD-RW drive. But I am at a lost to understand why it does not recognize the drive properly with DVD+R media. The only error code that I get is "DVDerr -224", but this comes up only after attempting to burn a dvd with myDVD. However when I'm doing a direct copy of a file from Windows Explorer the error messages just says something to the effect that no media is present or suggest that the media is full.

During my feable attempts to fix the problem I've updated the firmware on the LiteOn device (the Pioneer device was brand new so there was nothing to do). The driver for both devices were already part of XP and the manufacturer(s) didn't have an update on its website. I've also uninstalled and installed software that I thought may have caused the problem. Out of desperation I've also "upgraded" to XPSP2 but this did not help (though I wonder what evil awaits me now that I have SP2 installed). I also removed my CD-RW drive to no avail.

Please advise. Thank you in advance.

B

[guns1inger]

I hate to suggest it, because it should be a last resort only, but a reinstall of XP could be in order. Before taking such drastic measures though, I would suggest the following two steps first:

1. Power down and disconnect the DVD Drive. Start XP, shutdown, start again. Shutdown. Reconnect the DVD Drive. It should reinstall the drivers. See what happens.

2. If step one has not worked, you try a repair of XP. Insert the XP install CD while XP is running, and you should get an option to repair the installation. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what effect having SP2 installed will have on this step, so proceed with caution.

Because you have two drives exhibiting the same behaviour, it really does sound like something fundamental has gone pear-shaped with XP.