- Jan 25, 2005
- 229
- 0
- 76
I noticed a couple of days ago that both of my DVD drives (Hitachi GD-2500 DVD-ROM and NEC 3520-A) have stopped being able to read commercial DVDs. They can read CDs and recorded DVDs, but not DVDs purchased in a store.
When inserted, the drive will either (NEC) spin up, blink, the spin down; or (Hitachi) spin up, light up, and continue to spin indefinitely while the hard drive light comes on. Windows Explorer never recognizes that a DVD has been inserted. Windows often has trouble shutting down successfully after this.
Changes to the system in the last couple of months have been: new hard drive (Seagate ST3120026A-RK 120GB), new video card (MSI FX5900XT with appropriate drivers), and the latest AGP & IDE drivers on the motherboard (ECS KT600-A w/AMD Sempron 2500+) to support the new video card.
I suspect that it's software/driver/etc. related -- I can't see both drives failing in exactly the same way at the same time, losing just ability to read DVD-ROMs.
Any suggestions?
Update: On a hunch, I decided to simply uninstall the DVD drives in the Device Manager and reboot the system. After rebooting, the PC saw the "new" drives, configured them, then after another reboot, everything worked fine.
Things ran fine for a few days, then yesterday the drives again began failing to recognize a disk. I repeated the sequence above, and again they were fine, but very soon after they failed again.
*Something* is screwing up the drivers, but I can't figure out what...
Update: Updated the firmware on both drives, problem still occurs on both drives
Update: Pulled one of the drives and tested in another PC -- no problems, so it's not the hardware.
Update: Fixed! Looks the version of InCD included with Norton 7.0 was causing the problem. After removing that and performing occasional tests over the last couple of weeks, everything seems to be fine.
When inserted, the drive will either (NEC) spin up, blink, the spin down; or (Hitachi) spin up, light up, and continue to spin indefinitely while the hard drive light comes on. Windows Explorer never recognizes that a DVD has been inserted. Windows often has trouble shutting down successfully after this.
Changes to the system in the last couple of months have been: new hard drive (Seagate ST3120026A-RK 120GB), new video card (MSI FX5900XT with appropriate drivers), and the latest AGP & IDE drivers on the motherboard (ECS KT600-A w/AMD Sempron 2500+) to support the new video card.
I suspect that it's software/driver/etc. related -- I can't see both drives failing in exactly the same way at the same time, losing just ability to read DVD-ROMs.
Any suggestions?
Update: On a hunch, I decided to simply uninstall the DVD drives in the Device Manager and reboot the system. After rebooting, the PC saw the "new" drives, configured them, then after another reboot, everything worked fine.
Things ran fine for a few days, then yesterday the drives again began failing to recognize a disk. I repeated the sequence above, and again they were fine, but very soon after they failed again.
*Something* is screwing up the drivers, but I can't figure out what...
Update: Updated the firmware on both drives, problem still occurs on both drives
Update: Pulled one of the drives and tested in another PC -- no problems, so it's not the hardware.
Update: Fixed! Looks the version of InCD included with Norton 7.0 was causing the problem. After removing that and performing occasional tests over the last couple of weeks, everything seems to be fine.