Why won't my DVD player work?

September 23, 2006 11:33 PM

DVD Drive suddenly stopped working... why oh why?

I was backing up a game CD (those cheap $10 dollar ones you find in the bargain bin at Best Buy). I was using CloneCD and copying CD to CD from my really old CD drive to my 10 month old DVD writer.

Halfway through I got a read/write error and since I knew my old CD drive sorta acts a bit sketchy these days (this is the first time I've used it for months) I assumed that the CD drive just crapped out. So I switched the game CD to the DVD drive in order to copy from the DVD to my harddrive.

However, the DVD drive can not read any discs anymore. I can see the drive, but when I put a disc in it, nothing happens. When I click the drive, it says it's empty and to insert a disc. Oddly enough, the old drive can still see the disc.

I've tried several other discs with the same result. I've restarted and uninstalled the DVD drive and reinstalled. no improvement.
I've unplugged the IDE cable from the old drive and plugged it into the new one (in case the cable was screwy), but it's the same thing. I can see the drive, but the discs don't appear.

I have no clue what has happened. I can't think of why CloneCD would have affected how my DVD writer, but right before using the program, everything worked fine.

Any tips on what else to check or what might have happened?

And if anyone suggests the DVD drive physically being broken, how the heck do you confirm that when Windows can see it and says it's operating just fine?

posted by johnstein to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Try booting from that drive. Insert a bootable CD (like the Windows installation CD, for instance) and try to boot from it. That should take Windows out of the equation.

FWIW, the DVD writer in my laptop exhibited this behavior (would not recognize discs, would not boot from the drive) and I considered it physically broken.
posted by roomwithaview at 11:54 PM on September 23, 2006

I've had this problem twice. The first time, updating the driver fixed it. The second time, the drive was just broke, and I replaced it.
posted by muddgirl at 12:18 AM on September 24, 2006

Based on the assumption that you've power-cycled it and it didn't help, my guess would be that the seek motor died on you.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:44 AM on September 24, 2006

My guess is that it physically crapped out during the burn.
posted by delmoi at 1:06 AM on September 24, 2006

Satisfy my curiosity: is it a Sony?

I had a Sony DVD/CDRW combo drive in my Dell laptop, and one day it decided it didn't want to read the second layer of any dual-layer DVD movies. Most annoying.
posted by flabdablet at 5:17 AM on September 24, 2006