Driver for Sony DVD+-RW DW-D56A

[TimBooth4Eva]

Hope I'm in the correct forum here.....

I think I may have inadvertently messed around with my Sony Laptop DVD drive.

Its a D56A as above and everytime I boot up the laptop says it has found new hardware but cannot find the driver.

I can't find the driver on my installation disk (it's just not there) and the laptop wont System Restore.

I've looked all over for a driver to no avail.

I downloaded some firmware upgrade but when I try to install that, it says, 'no supported drive detected'

Any ideas.......

Thanks in anticipation

[thevoelk]

Go into Device Manager and Delete the driver controller and the drive itself. Windows should tell you you have to reboot.

The driver is built into Windows. Another option is to tell Windows "I Will Choose the Driver" and browse to your Windows\System32\drivers folder and point it to cdrom.sys. If it's not there, you can try going into a command prompt and typing:

expand [cd_drive]\i386\cdrom.sy_ c:\windows\system32\driver\cdrom.sys

I'm assuming that Windows is installed at c:\windows.

You may also be able to run from the command prompt:

sfc /scannow. It will require a Windows CD, not the SOny image restore CD since WIndows is compressed on it.

Hope this helps.

[TimBooth4Eva]

Thanx thevoelk

I did what you suggested. The DVD drive installed, or appeared to.....

When I reboot now, it no longer asks for drivers, but,

AnyDVD says theer is 'no DVD drive detected'
DVD43 says the same

Device Manager shows the Sony as being present and working correctly, but in My Computer/Window Explorer, there is no D drive shown,

What's happened there?!?

[TBoneit]

Are you sure you don't have a virus/trojan/spyware running in your computer. I've seen them cause a drive to not read & printers to not print. I hasten to add not in my computers, customers computers.

Good Luck

[TimBooth4Eva]

Thanx for the reply TBoneit but I've ran Adaware and done a virus check and found nothing unusual.

Still not recognising my D drive.

[TimBooth4Eva]

I think the driver I managed to install from Windows was either too old, or the wrong one causing my laptop not to detect the drive.

I've now uninstalled the Sony (again) and rebooted.

It then obviously finds 'new hardware' but not the driver.

If I ignore the message to install driver, it seems to work ok and it's also detected again in My Computer/AnyDVD etc etc.

All I seem to need is a driver for the drive but can't find one.

[TBoneit]

You can't find one because the optical drives all use the one from windows itself.

Try what thevoelk has suggested above, open the run window from teh start menu and enter:

sfc /scannow
It will require a Windows CD, not the Sony image restore CD since Windows is compressed on it.

that will check for deleted files etc.

to see what it does you can open a command prompt from the accesories menu and just type sfc /?
that will show you the switches and what it does.

Good Luck

[TimBooth4Eva]

Tboneit, I did the sfc /scannow thing but it didn't tell me anything.

Fortunately a guy from afterdawn (Mort81) suggested a link for some firmware at http://codeguys.rpc1.org/firmwares.html

That sorted the problem.

Thanx for the help and suggestions