Optical Drives won't play DVD's or Audio CD's?

[Robocrap]

Please please - any ideas anyone? Neither my CD Writer or my DVD will play normal Audio CD's / DVD movies. The DVD led just flickers for a while then goes quiet, and looking at the drive properties says "please insert disk". The musid cd's sometimes catch but then play in short bursts of stuttering sound. OS is windows ME, PC's a couple of years old 1ghz pentium, soundblaster Live! soundcard, which has always worked fine until now. I'm wondering if it's anything to do with the latest Windows Media Player v7. Creative Playcentre behaves exactly the same, but funny thing is Ultraplayer works near-perfect, just crackles a bit at the start and then is OK. Also installed Alcohol 120% recently which created a virtual CD/DVD Drive. confused

[Robocrap]

OK Geeks, I see a big fat Zero to replies on this problem. FYI, I've searched other forums and found loads of problems just like mine, particularly with Lite-On DVD ROM drives. It looks to me like they're just prone to crapping out, sometimes only when they're a few weeks old, so I'll have to consider myself lucky that I got a few years out of mine. Time for a replacement it seems.

[DutchMarco]

I also have about the same problem as you do. Our CD writer couldn't read empty cd, it sayd the drive was empty.

And I also have Alcohol120% and Daemon Tools (which is similar to Alcohol120%)

I managed to write a cd anyway with AVS media, which is freeware I downloaded from download.com
but in the end the making of the cd didn't work but the reason of that is still unknown... but maybe alcohol had something to do with it..

[Robocrap]

OK thanx for that. Maybe I'll uninstall Alcohol and try that before buying a new DVD Drive.

[DutchMarco]

watch out with uninstalling alcohol, when you do that u can't open the images u made (if you made any)

[Talt]

Not sure if this will help you guys or not but I had a very similar problem.
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=115952

I'm not very good with drivers but after trying alot of different things it was updating my drivers that finally did it. I used Drive Magic and manually selected the drivers I wanted from the recommended list it gave and proceeded to install (case u didn't read above thread). I'm still baffled that my whole system was fine before without updating drivers to then having to update them to get my system back to fine. Course I may have corrupted something :o but I thought I'ld mention it in case you haven't solved your issue yet.