Disappearing DVD drive

[Amit K.]

Hi everyone,

I have a serious problem. My DVD Drive disappears (in all windows applications) when I put in a DVD. I have to reboot to eject the DVD or use the drive. It displays the data CDs / VCDs just fine.

Here are my system specs. I have a P-III 800 processor with 256 MB SDRAM with Intel 815TM chipset motherboard. The AGP is S3 Savage-4 with 32 MB. I am using Windows ME. The DVD drive in question is Sony's DDU 1621 with v1.7 (region-locked) firmware. I also have a Realtek RTL8139/810X PCI ethernet card and a Frontech PCI TV Tuner/Capture card.

All other things are working fine, just playing the DVDs is a problem. I have tried upgrading my ASPI layers as well as using latest patches for hardware/software. The primary DVD player I am using is PowerDVD v4 and DVD Genie v4.1 combination. It used to play fine before, now it won't. No significant HW/SW changes were done from the time it was playing properly to now.

The drive just vanishes as soon as I put in a DVD. The drive light and the HDD light stay on till I reboot and I'm not able to eject the DVD till then. My system works fine during this (except for the DVD) and I can't notice any drop in performance because of the DVD and HDD lights being on.

I would be very grateful for any help anyone can give. I really don't have funds for upgrading HW/SW, so I would appreciate help focussed on reconfiguring some settings/freeware tools.

Thanks in advance,

Amit

[Prospero424]

Hmmm, my old CD-RW drive used to do something similar, so I know what you're going through.

It sounds like a problem with your actual drive locking up rather than a componenet of Windows or the rest of your PC. What I would try is getting the newest version of the firmware (onboard BIOS) for your DVD drive and flashing the drive to update it. You may have to look really hard for the firmware, and it may not even exist, depending on the brand.

Is the drive still under warranty? If not, you can always try taking it apart, cleaning it and putting it back together. I know this sounds silly, but I have gotten two other drives back into operating order this way. If it is still under warranty, send it in and have it repaired, but you might want to try it in another computer first in order to verify that the drive itself doesn't work as the Return to Manufacturer process can get VERY lengthy (we're talking months).

One other thing to try, you might disconnect the drive (power and data) boot up the computer, shut it back down, then attach the drive to another IDE channel (and preferably another ribbon cable) then boot it back up and try a DVD in the drive. If it is something lurking in the IDE sub-system, this should get rid of it.

Just some suggestions, let me know how it turns out,

Prospero

[crahak]

I had this too once, I upgraded the drive's firmware and everything went fine. Also it's RPC-1 too now Good luck!

[Heavensent]

you can try playing around with master/slave position
or it might be a bad cale thing.
try to disconnect it and then reconnect it,
it sound silly...but it worked for me.

[Amit K.]

Thanks for the suggestions guys I really appreciate them.

The DVD drive is an OEM so there's no support from the manufacturer (there was a big price difference so I had gone for this OEM). I've already flashed the latest firmware from Etna. I also took it apart as far as I could. I couldn't take the head assembly apart though and I didn't try it too hard since I have no way to realign the head should I screw up and I am sure I would have screwed up if I had tried to disassemble the head. I basically cleaned it, made sure the internal connectors were secure.

I've also tried the three primary slave/secondary master/slave configuration and the result is the same. I've also tried removing DVD Genie and using only PowerDVD with no success. Changing cables didn't help either.

The drive works fine for VCDs and Data CDs (provided I don't mount a DVD first to lock it up).

I really don't know much about this but could a faulty BIOS setting screw it up like this? I had changed the CMOS battery when my clock stopped working and had settled for the "optimized" settings in the BIOS.

What should I be looking for? Please help.

Thanks again for your help,

Amit