DVD drives not reading discs

Hi, first post here :)

I've recently installed Win 7 Ultimate x64 on both of my PCs, and neither can read my DVD+R discs properly.

I've got dual-boot on both systems, so I've checked and there's no problem at all in XP, but in Win 7 the drive goes crazy, almost like it's trying to read different parts of the disc at the same time. Anyway, it shows the contents but when I click on a folder, that's when it starts chugging and Explorer locks up until I eject the disc.

I did a fresh install of Win 7 into a VHD on PC 2, and that doesn't have any problem reading the discs, so something's happened on both since installing Win 7 I guess. I also used an XP guest in Virtualbox on PC 2 and that could read the discs just fine so it was obviously able to bypass whatever issue Win 7 has.

I had Daemon Tools on both PCs, but uninstalled it completely (including the SPTD driver) on PC 2, which didn't help. Neither did uninstalling Avira Antivir. I've disabled Indexing/Windows Search on both PCs, as well as Win 7's CD Burning function (via Group Policy Editor).

I found this thread cannot access dvd drive and this hotfix FIX: The DVD drive is not recognized after you install Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 which I've installed on PC 1 to no avail. PC 2 has SP1 installed.

It's obviously rather annoying to have to boot to XP (or use a VM) to copy files from DVD to my hard drive so that Win 7 can access them, so if anyone knows how to fix this problem I'd be most grateful.

EDIT: I meant to mention that I've checked and there's no Upper or Lower filters installed.

That post is about removing Upper and Lower filters. I don't have any of those to remove.

Your CD or DVD drive can't read or write media here is a fix to try

Sorry, should have mentioned in my original post that I've already run that on both PCs and it didn't find the problem.

You could try updating your chipset drivers & especially your storage controller driver when AHCI is enabled - with intel i fixed a few dvd drives this way - your AMD i notice or nforce - i can see your 2 cpus - if you go to the motherboards site or nvidia site or AMD site and download and install the latest chipset drivers and AHCI driver there is some chance you will fix the problem.

Britton30 said:

Welcome to Seven Forums doveman007.
If your drives are connected via SATA headers, you might give this a try
AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

Windows 7 handles power differently than did XP. How old are your drives? It may be they aren't compatible with Win 7? You might try unistalling the drivers for them, reboot to Win 7 and let Windows install them.

Don't know if this will help, good luck.

Thanks for the welcome Britton30

My drives are SATA but I don't use AHCI. The BIOS is set to Native IDE. I can't change this as I think it would stop both my XP and Win7 installations booting. I've always used the Native IDE mode as it was less complicated (with XP at least) and I have no need for the extra AHCI features.

My drives aren't old. PC2 has an Optiarc 7260S (I've also tried a Liteon iHAS624) and PC1 has a Liteon LH-20A1L and a Toshiba SH-D163B.

The hotfix I tried was to disable ALPM which is a power saving feature that apparently causes problems with some DVD drives, but it didn't fix my problem. I think this hotfix is in SP1, so no point installing it on PC2 which has SP1 already.

No harm in trying uninstalling the drivers and rebooting though. I compared the drivers in XP and Win7, which I've posted below.

XP:
Drivers - cdrom.sys, imapi.sys, redbook.sys, storprop.dll
Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller: atapi.sys, pciide.sys, pciidex.sys
---

Win7:
Drivers - cdrom.sys
Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller: atapi.sys, ataport.sys, pciide.sys, pciidex.sys

whest said:

You could try updating your chipset drivers & especially your storage controller driver when AHCI is enabled - with intel i fixed a few dvd drives this way - your AMD i notice or nforce - i can see your 2 cpus - if you go to the motherboards site or nvidia site or AMD site and download and install the latest chipset drivers and AHCI driver there is some chance you will fix the problem.

My motherboards are both ATI chipsets, 780G and 790GX. I think some of the chipset drivers are included in the Catalyst package and I've installed the optional South Bridge driver, so I think I've got the latest drivers installed.

As I said to Britton30, I don't use AHCI and have Native IDE set in the BIOS. My hard drives are running fine anyway.

Just in case anyone missed it in my original post, I installed Win7 into a VHD on PC2 and the drives work fine in that (with the default drivers), so unless the newer ATI drivers have screwed things up (which I think unlikely), I don't think it's a driver issue.

That fix britton30 suggested to enable AHCI now your OS is up would only work with W7 and not XP as XP requires the driver to be installed using the F6 method, the same as raid, HENCE, w7 would boot, but XP wouldnt meaning you would have to reinstall xp plus the driver for it work, and since its dual boot, W7 would be removed from the MBR and would be hard to fix without reinstalling - although maybe there is a fix for that, I dont know. So AHCI is out of the question unfortunately, and im out of ideas.