Neither DVD reader/writer reading any discs

I have no idea what caused this. I have two DVD drives--one 22X and one 24X, both made by LG-HITACHI--and I hardly ever use them. It is normal for me to go weeks at a time without using them, and during one of these periods they both stopped working (the time span makes it impossible to find a cause).

I have searched other forums and haven't returned anything that helped me.

Here are some things that I've tried/observed:

-No exclamation points in device manager
-Rerouted wires in my computer a while ago and may have accidentally reversed SATA cables, but tried both ways and found this not to be the case.
-When a disc is in, the green light blinks on and off for about a minute, then has about 10 seconds during which it stops flashing, then continues. While flashing, Explorer locks up if I try to access the drive, and the drive cannot be ejected (with the button, OR with right-click>eject in Explorer). When the light is off, it says "insert a disc" and the disc can be ejected either way.
-Will not read any discs, I have tried a DVD, a computer game, and a driver disc
-Both drives have the same issue, so it's not like the drive is a lemon

Possible theories:
-Since both are made by the same company, is it causing interference with the software?
-No clue.

Please post some ideas, because it's really debilitating not to have any disc drives.

You may have two identical drives and windows could care less.

First if you have not already tried this I would give it a try:

Go back into device manager and delete both drives then shut the system down. Unplug the SATA cable from one of the drives and reboot and see if windows finds it and installs it correctly and if so test that one drive and see if it is working now.

By chance if this corrects that drives problems then, shut down, reconnect the SATA cable to the other drive and reboot and hopefully that will install the second dive and then test it.

If all that fails then download ImgBurn and go into Settings and click on "Filter Driver Load Order" and take a screen capture of that and post it back here so I can see if you might have some bad filters on the system.

Hope this helps

whs said:

May be it is a filter problem. Here is the fix: Your CD or DVD drive can't read or write media

I tried doing this, but the wizard displayed a message saying it couldn't continue because an error occurred. Re-launching the wizard shows a dialog box saying that the previous instance couldn't continue due to an error.


I have not previously have a chance, but in a couple minutes now I'll try Kipper's suggestion.

Kipper said:

You may have two identical drives and windows could care less.

First if you have not already tried this I would give it a try:

Go back into device manager and delete both drives then shut the system down. Unplug the SATA cable from one of the drives and reboot and see if windows finds it and installs it correctly and if so test that one drive and see if it is working now.

By chance if this corrects that drives problems then, shut down, reconnect the SATA cable to the other drive and reboot and hopefully that will install the second dive and then test it.

If all that fails then download ImgBurn and go into Settings and click on "Filter Driver Load Order" and take a screen capture of that and post it back here so I can see if you might have some bad filters on the system.

Hope this helps

Unfortunately, the first steps failed--with only one drive connected, that drive displayed the same behavior as before even though Windows automatically "installed correctly" the drivers.

Using Imgburn, "none found" is displayed for every filter.

You do not have any bad filters, actually you don't have any filters. LOL

You having tried the quick fix and the suggestions I offered up the only thing I would do now is if you have access to a know working drive from another system in the house or a friend or someone that you can borrow and toss it on your system and see if you have the same problem and if so then it might time for a repair install of windows as a minimum.

Sorry I couldn't help you out my friend

Thanks for the help anyway. The guest room at our house has an old IDE drive and I'd imagine that should work, since I have a feeling the problem has something to do with the SATA connections. Reinstalling Windows would be the biggest pain in my a$$... I'll have to wait for summer for enough time to reinstall hundreds of programs... lol

Finally got this fixed. I grabbed an old IDE drive and when I went to plug it in, while searching for an open molex power connector, I saw a little gold wire sticking straight up. Turns out it fell out of the 1x molex to 2x SATA I had used to plug BOTH these drives in.

Basically, the drives were getting enough power to be detected but not to spin the disc, which required that extra voltage.

It's just my luck that the least likely item would be the failure. Luckily it's working nicely now, and won't cost me a dime to fix, just some electrical tape =P

Thanks everyone, I know it would have been impossible for any of you to know this was the cause, just tells me I need to check EVERYTHING, no matter how unlikely. Thanks anyway to everyone.