Is my SATA DVD burner dead?

Ronin13

Senior member
Aug 5, 2001
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I just build a new rig (see the specs in my sig) with a Plextor SATA DVD burner. For a couple of weeks everything worked just fine, but when I turned the machine on today, it didn't see the DVD burner. I can't see it in the BIOS, it doesn't show up in device manager or in My Computer. The LED lights up but it won't eject the tray when I push the button. It won't even eject when I stick in the thin metal thingy in the emergency eject hole.

The last thing I used the drive for, was trying to see a DVD movie, which I couldn't - I got an error message that it couldn't play since I didn't have DVD decoder software on the machine, when I tried to play it with Windows Mediaplayer. (I was eventually going to install Cybelink's Power DVD software from a disk, but this is kinda hard whitout a working optical drive...)

Btw, if it matters, I'm in Europe where DVD movies normally are region 2. The movie I tried watching was region 1, and I suspect the drive will only let me switch between regions a couple of times before locking on to one final region. But since this was the first DVD movie I tried in the machine I didn't expect it to be a problem (I have previously installed a game from a DVD).

Does anyone know how to 'wake up' my drive?

edit: Tried some different SATA ports on the motherboard. With one the drive still wasn't recognized, but the LED didn't light up and the tray would open. On another port the drive was finally seen on a reboot and it seems to be working fine now *fingers crossed*.
 

Captante

Lifer
Oct 20, 2003
30,316
10,814
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The first thind to do is check & make sure the SATA cable is still connected because they can easily work themselves loose. If it is, try disconnecting both it & the power from the drive, reboot, shut down again & re-attach... you can also try connecting it to another SATA port on the motherboard if you have one free. Finally, try clearing the CMOS & re-starting to see if that has any effect.

If none of that works it could be time for an RMA.
 

Ronin13

Senior member
Aug 5, 2001
374
0
76
Thanks for your reply! As you can see in my edit above it seems like I fixed it :)