Windows 7 - Empty optical drive indicates it has audio cd

Hello,
I have a windows 7 64 bit computer with a Plextor blu ray DVD drive. When I start the pc or reboot, the drive indicates it has an audio cd in it even though it is empty. If I put a cd in it, it will not autoplay. If I then open the drive and close it, it will auto play from then on and no longer indicate it has an audio cd until I restart the pc. I have set the autoplay options all to ask me what to do and the optical drive has the latest firmware. I would appreciate any help with this.

If you have the latest driver/firmware updates for the drive, it could be that the drive itself is going bad. With out knowing the exact model number it's hard to check specifications and downloads needed.

Welcome to SevenForums, Acolberg1.

Looks like you have a custom-built PC. Was it self-built or by a professional/vendor?

How old is your Plextor Bluray drive? More specifically is it still under warranty?

Is this problem there from the beginning or did it come up recently?

If it is there from the beginning, I am afraid, you have a faulty drive.

I've checked the drive with Plex Utillities and it indicates there is nothing wrong with the drive. The drive is only about 2 weeks old. Originally the optical drive was the d: drive, but windows changed it to G: and added a system reserve and made that the d: drive.

When you install Windows, a 100MB System Reserved partition is created(No drive letter is assigned). C will be your system drive and D will be your optical drive. Everything fits in.

But how come another System Reserved partition D ? What did you do? What about E and F?

Can you put out a screenshot of the Disk Management ?

Hello,

The system made the 100MB system reserve, but it assigned it letter d:. My optical drive was d: and it was assigned letter g: I have 3 hard drives-c:, e:, and f:. The system reserve that d: presently is part of my third drive f:. By the way, my PC often reboots when I go into the internet (bugcheck code 278), though I'm not sure it has anything to do with this. I only mention it because you said the system reserve is not normally assigned a drive letter and if I remember correctly this whole thing with the letter reassignments happened after a reboot. Sorry, I don't know how to do a screen shot.

Fixing this problem has been discussed here; follow gregrocker's instructions. Basically, you'll need to use Diskpart to mark the partitions correctly, then after changing your boot order in the BIOS to the optical drive, use the Windows 7 DVD repair console.

To take a screen shot: click the Start button, and in the Search box type snip; at the top under Programs you'll see Snipping Tool. You can take a screen shot of anything with it and save it to disk, then when posting use the Attachments button to upload.

The attached is a copy of my disk management

Just to explain the above, I did as suggested and copied my boot files to c:, then deleted the d: drive which had been called system reserved. Now I would like to change my optical drive back to d: (which may take care of the audio cd problem), but have not done so because I have several programs that normally use the optical drive (such as Cyberling Blu Ray Suite or Itunes, etc.) and I am not sure if they would work properly if they no longer saw the optical drive as g:. I would appreciate comments on this.

Just so you understand, you no longer have a Reserved Partition which is okay, but it means you won't be able to use Bitlocker if you intend to do so; also if you ever need the Repair Console you can't press F8 at boot but instead you'll need to use the Windows 7 DVD to repair.

On the programs that use the optical drive, you should have under Preferences or some heading in the programs you use the option to select the drive that the program uses. Or you can just leave the optical drive as G: and change (in Disk Management, right click and select Change Drive Letter and Paths) the other drives to D, E, and F making Disk 1 into two partitions since it's large anyway. Having your optical drives come alphabetically after SSDs or HDDs is fine. You should clean up the unallocated space on Disk 2 as well.